Obsidian on Linux is Slow to point of Unusable

I had the same problem. I use Appimage Obsidian 0.10.6 in mxlinux 19.2 using debian 10 buster as a base.

While I used the Googlechrome browser, I started the obsidian (appImage) and changed the themes, then it suddenly slowed down to a halt and no response. I see this could be a problem of the electron base or whatever. Then I closed it from the panel icon, and then restarted it, it seems ok.
Could this be due to themes? what if I had choosed the troublesome theme, then how do I reset it back to the default? Is this theme changing or other than default theme caused problem while changing? I donā€™t know.

I plan to install it thru snap package instead of appImage, then it asked me to install in user mode or system mode? I am planning to install as a system snap application, so it may have access all over them system.

Now it seems ok. I am not going to change the theme 80_neon which is selected by me. If the problem comes, I will raise it.

Thank you everybody for the datapoints.
I also think that this is not an obsidian internal problem but something external at electron/os level.

I am not convinced that this a broad X11 issue because X11 is quite popular and we would have many more reports.
Perhaps itā€™s problem with specific GPU drivers and this should happen in other electron apps.

You can try to start obsidian w/o gpu accelleration with --disable-gpu

Which Window Manager or DE are you using? And which display manager? As I wrote above, the problem shows when I use X Windows based environments, but everything is fine in Gnome on Wayland. Have you tried experimenting with this?

You are right, disabling GPU acceleration worked. Is there a way to do this permanently so I donā€™t have to call Obsidian from the command line every time? I tried looking through the settings menu but havenā€™t found anything so far.

You can add it to your obsidian.desktop file

Thanks. May I suggest that this be a switch in the Settings menu? Itā€™ll be a quick and simple way for users to switch off some problems they might have.

I do think that there was a (related) feature request for that: Option to disable hardware acceleration but was merged into another bug report. Iā€™ve reopened it in case you want to add a comment there, but feel free to open a separate #feature-requests if you like.

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ā€“disable-gpu fixed the issue. Thanks everyone!!

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I have left a comment in the feature request.

Over the last few days I have had an issue with Obsidian being slow. My file probably totals about 1Mb and a opening time of about 15 seconds.

I downloaded the appappimage and instantly it dropped to about 1 to 2 seconds.

On another note, I was unble to open any of my virtual box VMs. It appears that Iā€™ve done a kernel upgrade and had to go back to .4 version. Seems a bit much of a coincidence for me :slight_smile: In the meantime I will look at keeping the appimage and see what happens when 5.8 is more stable.

Interesting. Glad youā€™re getting to the bottom of it.
FWIW, my Manjaro system is currently using 5.10.2 kernel. I see ~10sec startup, but that setup is an older i3 with 8g of ram. Still - once Iā€™m in, I see no real difference as compared to my i7 surface with a SSD.
Iā€™ve been using the AppImage for months now, with zero issues.

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Iā€™ll move this to the archive since it seems to work now for the OP. If someone in the thread is still having issues, please open a new #bug-reports using the template so we have all the required info.

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