Chrome and Fedora 39 + KDE + Wayland crashing desktop sessions like craaaazy.
This is getting really bad - Chrome and Fedora + KDE + Wayland are crashing the crud out of each other. Here is one site that almost always crashes my session when I zoom or pan around in the map: https://ops.alertcalifornia.org/ - JS error is “video context lost”. The the video driver reloads and the session continues, although the site’s map features don’t work anymore.
At other times, my session just locks up, and when I log in from another host via ssh and use top, chrome is using all the CPU and VM/swap it can. When I kill chrome, my desktop exits. I don’t have any extensions installed except “Google Docs Offline”.
I am using google-chrome-stable-126.0.6478.126-1 from the distribution and everything else is latest 39 rpm’s.
Video is
74:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Rembrandt [Radeon 680M] [1002:1681] (rev c9)
Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device [1002:0124]
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Maybe google-chrome runs ok on gnome because it defaults to gtk and on kde it defaults to qt theme.
Or maybe the wayland compositor used is less stable, kwin vs mutter.
Wayland is not crap. Anyone who says so disparages the huge and successful effort to make it the defacto standard, and I wish to honor those brave souls who made it so by using it.
I’ve identified one web site that can crash my desktop pretty reliably on Google Chrome; the site’s mobile version causes my phone to heat up and get sluggish. So it’s some sort of hideous JS bug that I don’t have the skills to debug. The crash is definitely a GPU reset and not Wayland barfing. So I switched to Microsoft Edge as an experiment. The site locks up for a few seconds but doesn’t seem to actually reboot the GPU like Chrome did. (It uses chromium for its back end so it has a lot of code in common.) At this point I only slightly suspect t has anything to do with Wayland.
There is also a pissing match going on between Libreoffice and Wayland that causes Qt pulldown menus to act wonky and both point the finger at Qt so it will probably never get fixed. It’s only a trivial annoyance. It’s otherwise stable (HW acceleration is disabled, it didn’t seem to make a difference in performance.)
Every native KDE app works flawlessly. VLC works fine.
I’ll will concede that most gamers seem to favor Xorg, probably for reasons. But unless you’re a gamer, you should switch.
I switched to MS Edge, zero crashes since, even on the website ops.alertwildfore.org that used to hang my system so hard it had to be power cycled. It is Chromium-based, I trust MS’s password store, and it imported all my Chrome settings, etc. MS even has a Fedora repo so it updates with dnf.
Amdgpu used to be quite flaky, but it’s been solid for about 6 mo now. I have a 6600H CPU and not an external GPU, YMMV.
This gave me a clue actually, for me chrome crashes because it ramps up the CPU, I’m using the classic theme to the QT theme the crashes stopped. Chrome is still a processor hog especially when working with google docs but it doesn’t ramp up as before.
The site locks up for a few seconds but doesn’t seem to actually reboot the GPU like Chrome did. (It uses chromium for its back end so it has a lot of code in common.) At this point I only slightly suspect t has anything to do with Wayland.