What I’m trying to do
Hi,
Obsidian opens to a black screen and then freezes. I have to force close it and restart it.
I followed some of the recommended fixes in the thread dealing with this intermittent issue, but I think my problem is GPU driver related and possibly specific to my Linux distro.
I am posting a message here in the hope that someone could suggest whether this is an Obsidian issue or a Linux distro issue, in which case I can then seek help in an appropriate forum.
I am using Fedora 40, Gnome desktop. My hardware is a 12th Gen Intel CPU (onboard graphics) and a Radeon RX5700 GPU, which provides the video output. I don’t use the onboard graphics.
I have three Obsidian vaults that are hosted on a Samba share on a separate computer on my LAN. I mount the shared folder locally (/mnt/foo/) to access the vault. More often than not, Obsidian will present a black screen when I start the app. I then have to force the window to close and restart Obsidian, which will then load the vault without the black screen, but always with the appearance scale setting reset to 100% (I prefer 144% scaling for my monitor).
When the ‘crash’ happens, the process is always the same:
- Obsidian crashes when I open it.
- The vault will always open at the next attempt.
Sometimes, when Obsidian is open and running, the same ‘crash’ will happen when I try to open a different vault using the pop-up list at the bottom left of the screen. In this manner, the crash does not always happen when I start Obsidian, but it is more common for it to happen then.
I am presently using the Snap version of Obsidian (1.6.7) but the same problem occurred when I used the Flatpak version. I have not tried the appimage.
Obsidian used to work fine and this problem started about a month ago, although it seems to happen more frequently these last few weeks. Fedora updates frequently, so I did not notice whether it was a Obsidian update or a Fedora update that produced these crashes.
After booting today, Obsidian crashed in the manner described above. I typed sudo journalctl to view the logs and I saw many entries for Obsidian, which appeared to fail when looking in the wrong place for GPU drivers when it started. Here is the initial few lines from the log:
Jul 30 13:52:52 fed2 systemd[2594]: snap.obsidian.obsidian-6a79c122-c3d5-47cb-bb83-f8afa53f0ef0.scope: Consumed 3.241s CPU time.
Jul 30 13:52:53 fed2 systemd[2594]: Started app-gnome-obsidian_obsidian-5291.scope - Application launched by gnome-shell.
Jul 30 13:52:53 fed2 systemd[2594]: Started snap.obsidian.obsidian-fca60992-6367-4674-9996-7fec01016ead.scope.
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5291]: 2024-07-30 12:52:54 Loading main app package /var/lib/snapd/snap/obsidian/35/resources/obsidian.asar
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 systemd[1]: bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service was skipped because of an unmet condition check (ConditionPathIsDirectory=/sys/class/bluetooth).
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5291]: 2024-07-30 12:52:54 Checking for update using Github
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open radeonsi: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: failed to load driver: radeonsi
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open radeonsi: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: failed to load driver: radeonsi
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open zink: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/zink_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open radeonsi: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: failed to load driver: radeonsi
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open radeonsi: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: failed to load driver: radeonsi
Jul 30 13:52:54 fed2 obsidian_obsidian.desktop[5374]: MESA-LOADER: failed to open swrast: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory (search paths /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri, suffix _dri)
There are a lot more errors in the log, but I thought I would start at the beginning!
Things I have tried
I tried the following, but the problem persists:
I disabled all community plugins.
I removed a vault, deleted everything in the .obsidian folder, and then re-added it to Obsidian.
I sacrificed a pint of beer to the God of Computer Misfortune (well, I drunk it actually, but it’s more or less the same thing).
Summary
I don’t know whether this is an Obsidian bug or a Fedora bug. Nobody is shouting about this specific problem in either forum(s), so it seems to be specific to me.
However, journalctl seems to suggest to me that Obsidian is having some problems with loading my graphics drivers, so I thought I would start with these initial errors and then move on to the very long list of other Obsidian-related errors in the logs.