GUI starts flickering / stops drawing tiles on Linux (Flatpak)

[JayPi4c]

Describe the bug
When playing music with the new 2.0 Desktop release, after some time the GUI starts to not draw tiles (covers of albums / series / movies, images of actors/actresses, as well as control buttons).

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open application
2. Start a song
3. Wait for problem to happen

Expected behavior
GUI does not start to flicker and stays usable.

Screenshots

(notice in the bottom, the control panel has completely disappeared. However, this is only visually. When clicking at the right position, the behavior is as expected.)

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
• Version 24.04.3
• Installation Method: flatpak install flathub org.jellyfin.JellyfinDesktop
• Jellyfin Server Version: 10.10.7
• No custom CSS

Additional context

When starting in the console, i get the following logs:

flatpak run org.jellyfin.JellyfinDesktop 
[2:53:0104/101752.453718:ERROR:bus.cc(408)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
LIRC Socket Error :  QLocalSocket::ServerNotFoundError
Failed to init component: display
Cannot load libcuda.so.1
[128:9:0104/104638.689797:ERROR:tile_manager.cc(999)] WARNING: tile memory limits exceeded, some content may not draw
[128:9:0104/104638.690238:ERROR:tile_manager.cc(999)] WARNING: tile memory limits exceeded, some content may not draw
[128:9:0104/104638.719065:ERROR:tile_manager.cc(999)] WARNING: tile memory limits exceeded, some content may not draw
[128:9:0104/104638.719474:ERROR:tile_manager.cc(999)] WARNING: tile memory limits exceeded, some content may not draw
[128:9:0104/104638.736371:ERROR:tile_manager.cc(999)] WARNING: tile memory limits exceeded, some content may not draw
...

The logs about:

[2:53:0104/101752.453718:ERROR:bus.cc(408)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
LIRC Socket Error :  QLocalSocket::ServerNotFoundError
Failed to init component: display
Cannot load libcuda.so.1

seem to be unrelated. They come up right after the application is started and everything is working great at that point.

It seems to me, that the tile_manager.cc has some kind of memory leak. Or somewhere an invocation of a method to free memory is forgotten.

As a workaround, I found it to be possible to press the home button or start a video which seems to reset the memory manager and frees the memory, thus fixing gui glitches.

[n-peugnet]

This might be a symptom of #1076

[JayPi4c]

You might be right.
I noticed, that the memory footprint is only increasing, when streaming or loading other data from the server: very fast when streaming a high resolution video, slower with low resolution, very slow with music and almost none with no streaming (maybe loading some icons/covers?).
Also interesting: while doing this adhoc investigation, I did not experience any flickering. However, the memory usage increased from about 210 MB to 660 MB in maybe 30 minutes browsing the library while streaming music or different resolution videos.

edit:
The flickering and ui glichtching is not tied to a some very high ram usage. I just got the flickering again with about 350 MB of memory usage.

[TheM1Stery]

I also get flickering when a skin is installed. Base jellyfin skin doesn't flicker, but any other skin renders the ui unusable

[RC-1290]

I also get flickering when a skin is installed. Base jellyfin skin doesn't flicker, but any other skin renders the ui unusable

Good find!

I'm getting the impression it's linked to
backdrop-filter: blur(10px)
in the custom css.
(blur size does not seem to matter, it happens with 1px,5px, 10px and 100px)

Visibility of various elements appears to be linked to updates of the GUI. If you keep your mouse still, and pause the music, you can keep everything in one visibility state, until the background image changes. So when you just use your mouse these elements all keep switching between visible and invisible.

Current work-around: Disable server-provided custom CSS code.
(optional) Copy paste the server css to the client, and comment out all lines with backdrop-filter:blur().

OS: Cachy-OS
Kernel: Linux 6.18.6-2-cachyos
DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.5
WM: KWin (Wayland)
Installation Method: flatpak

[RC-1290]

Update: I've noticed that while disabling the blur helps, it doesn't completely get rid of flickering.