Constant Predictable (and Unpredictable) Crashes to Desktop - Apparently Relating to CSS

acook · August 19, 2026, 5:40pm

I’m pretty impressed that a few lines of CSS can crash Obsidian but that seems to be the case here. With all plugins disabled Obsidian will predictably crash when certain CSS is applied. It will also crash other times, under less certain circumstances.

Steps to reproduce

use Obsidian 1.13.7
use the Enthemic theme (or any other theme or snippet which triggers the issue)
open settings, go to community plugins, open any plugin page in the browser

Did you read and follow the Troubleshooting Guide ? Yes

Expected result

You should see the plugin page.

Actual result

The plugin page starts to load and then Obsidian entirely crashes to desktop.

Environment

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.13.7
Installer version: 1.13.7
Operating system: #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC 2026-08-10 7.1.8-352.current
Login status: logged in
Language: en
Catalyst license: vip
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: Enthemic 1.0.0
Snippets enabled: 6
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 42
Plugins enabled: 0

Solus 4.9 Serenity
KDE
AppImage
Wayland

Additional information

This started happening when I upgraded to Obsidian 1.13.x in the last week or so. I can’t recall any kind of instability like this with 1.12.x or earlier in the same environment and using the same theme for the past 12+ months.

It always crashes on the community plugins pages but I have also had crashes happen randomly when doing things like editing embedded bases while in the properties menu.

Theme: acook/Enthemic: Obsidian Theme - Codeberg.org

The theme has a variety of things that could be improved about it, but even after heavily editing the theme locally and removing most of its contents the crashes keep happening. I haven’t pinned down the line or combination of lines that triggers the crashes yet. But it is within the first 600 or so lines because I’m still seeing crashes when the rest is deleted and Obsidian is restarted.

I haven’t tested many other themes but the default theme and Minimal theme do not trigger the CTD.

Crash log captured by KDE Plasma:

           PID: 383008 (obsidian)
           TID: 383024 (ThreadPoolForeg)
           UID: 1000 (user)
           GID: 1000 (user)
        Signal: 4 (ILL) si_code: ILL_ILLOPN
     Timestamp: Tue 2026-08-18 23:22:36 CDT (7min ago)
  Command Line: $'/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian --enable-speech-dispatcher'
    Executable: /tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian
 Control Group: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/[email protected]/app.slice/app-md.obsidian.Obsidian-383008.scope
          Unit: [email protected]
     User Unit: app-md.obsidian.Obsidian-383008.scope
         Slice: user-1000.slice
     Owner UID: 1000 (user)
       Boot ID: dfacc0aeedaa450eb898cf628d1d4339
    Machine ID: ad6059b5df253cf22323d397513a8861
      Hostname: Construct
       Storage: /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.obsidian.1000.dfacc0aeedaa450eb898cf628d1d4339.383008.1787113356000000.zst (present)
  Size on Disk: 17.8M
       Message: Process 383008 (obsidian) of user 1000 dumped core.

                Stack trace of thread 383024:
                #0  0x00005574ead58b76 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55ffb76)
                #1  0x00005574ead56d1c n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55fdd1c)
                #2  0x00005574ead56ae5 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55fdae5)
                #3  0x00005574ea0cf637 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4976637)
                #4  0x00005574eae24c2f n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x56cbc2f)
                #5  0x00005574eab16c05 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x53bdc05)
                #6  0x00005574eab16a40 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x53bda40)
                #7  0x00005574e9ce4480 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x458b480)
                #8  0x00005574e9ce2582 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4589582)
                #9  0x00005574e9cdeda5 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4585da5)
                #10 0x00005574e9ce34b7 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x458a4b7)
                #11 0x00005574e9280649 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x3b27649)
                #12 0x00005574e983ea75 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x40e5a75)
                #13 0x00005574e8a0a630 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x32b1630)
                #14 0x00005574e8a12f76 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x32b9f76)
                #15 0x00005574e8a1134f n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x32b834f)
                #16 0x00005574eaeb50ad n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x575c0ad)
                #17 0x00005574eaeb501f n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x575c01f)
                #18 0x00005574ea1d0048 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4a77048)
                #19 0x00007efc808a6fbe n/a (libc.so.6 + 0xa6fbe)
                #20 0x00007efc80938f8c n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x138f8c)

                Stack trace of thread 383008:
                #0  0x00007efc808af492 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0xaf492)
                #1  0x00007efc808a3438 n/a (libc.so.6 + 0xa3438)
                #2  0x00007efc8092a4c3 ppoll (libc.so.6 + 0x12a4c3)
                #3  0x00007efc822aaabf n/a (libglib-2.0.so.0 + 0x80abf)
                #4  0x00007efc822aabd8 g_main_context_iteration (libglib-2.0.so.0 + 0x80bd8)
                #5  0x00005574e8a07192 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x32ae192)
                #6  0x00005574ea0ed982 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4994982)
                #7  0x00005574ea0ed101 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4994101)
                #8  0x00005574ead22491 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55c9491)
                #9  0x00005574ead21383 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55c8383)
                #10 0x00005574ead2121b n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55c821b)
                #11 0x00005574eaeb9c17 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x5760c17)
                #12 0x00005574ead20fb1 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x55c7fb1)
                #13 0x00005574ea4ea5f6 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4d915f6)
                #14 0x00005574ea4e9dfa n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4d90dfa)
                #15 0x00005574ea4e9c29 n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x4d90c29)
                #16 0x00007efc8082b5ac n/a (libc.so.6 + 0x2b5ac)
                #17 0x00007efc8082b6ca __libc_start_main (libc.so.6 + 0x2b6ca)
                #18 0x00005574eb0a312a n/a (/tmp/.mount_obsidi8SEeqJ/obsidian + 0x594a12a)
                ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

Probably not very useful, more here as an artifact of the type of crash it is.

Happens both with the latest (1.13.7) AppImage and also happened with the previous (1.12.7) AppImage I used - but only after the internal upgrade to 1.13.7.

WhiteNoise · August 19, 2026, 5:48pm

This is such a severe crash, that it’s most likely an electron/chrome problem.

WhiteNoise · August 19, 2026, 5:50pm

such as?

acook · August 20, 2026, 11:40am

I haven’t tested them all, but it’s unlikely that this CSS issue is unique to one theme.

While it may be an Electron bug, it wasn’t triggered before Obsidian 1.13.x while still using the 1.12.7 AppImage. So it it was the Obsidian-side changes that triggered the crash. I know there was a CodeMirror update in there as well as some other stylesheet changes. Those are likely candidates.

I just had another random crash while opening a note. This is a first. After switching themes again I went and looked at the note and didn’t see anything odd. Maybe its something to do with the density of rendered markdown shared by bases, plugins pages, and notes with lots of tables? Just a shot in the dark at this point.

acook · August 21, 2026, 2:40pm

Just had a crash while using a quite simple snippet. All it does is set some font styles for headings and a couple of other things.

This helped me track down the exact trigger. A font! Or at least, one font, not ruling out others.

Based on this I’ve crafted a CSS rule which will reliably and immediately crash Obsidian on startup:

body {
    --font-text: "AmstelvarA2 Roman";
}

This is a bog-standard official Google Font: GitHub - googlefonts/amstelvar-avar2: R&D version of Amstelvar with avar2 to replace gvar data · GitHub

I’ve been using this font for .markdown-rendered for over a year. Maybe two! Needless to say, this font does not crash Chrome.

The fact that Obsidian 1.13.x combined with this font causes a hard CTD is pretty strange!

Further testing with the font shows that multiple versions of the font cause the crash, both old versions and current as well as italic, further strengthening my suspicion that there are likely more fonts out there which trigger this crash.

One more update: The newer versions of the font may be so toxic to Obsidian that they cause it to crash during initialization! I was trying out different versions and suddenly Obsidian was dying before even showing the UI. It only stopped after I uninstalled the font entirely.

Pch · August 21, 2026, 3:50pm

FWIW : This closed GH issue might be relevant:

github.com/googlefonts/amstelvar-avar2

[Aw, Snap!] Chrome crashes opening AmstelVar

opened 04:00PM - 30 Jun 26 UTC

closed 12:34PM - 01 Jul 26 UTC

graphicore

First: as this is a hard browser crash I don't think the fonts are to blame alo…ne, the browser should never crash if a font is malformed. But, I want to use this issue/tracker to collect evidence and cases and maybe the fonts will require a fix as well, eventually. @dberlow reported to me that [TypeRoof](https://fontbureau.github.io/TypeRoof/shell) is crashing when `AmstelvarA2` is selected. I was tasked to find out if it's a bug in TypeRoof or elsewhere. In TypeRoof we use `woff2` version of the fonts created with `woff2_compress` in an automated gitHub action (https://github.com/FontBureau/TypeRoof/blob/main/.github/workflows/update-fonts.yaml) but I created an isolated test case that crashes Chrome on my Linux machine with the `.ttf` fonts directly from this repository. I'm going to attach the test files to this issue and in subsequent messages add crash-reports and findings. [case-AmstelvarA2-Roman_avar2.ttf.zip](https://github.com/user-attachments/files/29513843/case-AmstelvarA2-Roman_avar2.ttf.zip) The font is `Fonts/AmstelvarA2-Roman_avar2.ttf` from d4da8adac627 which is the current latest in main 2215eec7cfcb669e0d40f081f2bd0133e80391d0 Google Chrome: Version 149.0.7827.114 (Official Build) (64-bit) Loaded via JavaScript, case-AmstelvarA2-Roman_avar2.ttf/js-fontface.html: <img width="703" height="465" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b41b9db3-b6bb-4873-aeff-fab04b4453dd" /> Loaded via CSS/@font-face, case-AmstelvarA2-Roman_avar2.ttf/css-fontface.html <img width="703" height="465" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b8bcaffd-b985-4f16-9ab4-377176498db0" />

acook · August 25, 2026, 12:24pm

Good catch! That is too similar to discount.

I was under the impression that the version of Electron/Chomium was locked with the initial download - which is why Obsidian recommends downloading the latest after an Electron update. But the crashes started happening in the last couple weeks while using the same AppImage that I’ve been using since March, coinciding with a normal in-app update. So while this is likely the same root cause, I’m still curious about how it wasn’t a problem for 5+ months and then suddenly was!