GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 719891
Mono applications not launching when started via gnome-shell on Nvidia systems
Last modified: 2013-12-20 11:24:22 UTC
As of late I'm experiencing a weird issue where launching tomboy via "Activities" will fail to create a new window. The process will be running, but no window is shown. A tray entry seems to be created but does not function. Launching tomboy from a terminal will work normally, however. In https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1356061 , it is suggested that this affects all mono-based applications, and it seems to be limited to systems running the Nvidia blob.
I'm not totally sure whether this is only limited to Mono-based applications. I see a very similar, though not identical bug when launching guake via the Gnome shell. Here, guake creates a window and can be interacted with, but stalls with a zombified bash instance when exiting the bash session. Same as the bug originally described, this is completely resolved when guake is launched via a terminal window, and it doesn't appear on my otherwise identical non-Nvidia system.
Similar behavior is observed with the gnome-terminal window itself. When I launch gnome-terminal via the shell, I can interact just fine. When I exit the bash session, the window closes properly (so no stall as with guake). But when I look at the output of ps, I can consistently see that there's now a zombified gnome-terminal process lingering around. In fact this seems to be the case with *any* application launched from the Gnome shell ._o .. And the generalization that it doesn't happen unless gnome-shell is the parent seems to hold up, i.e. it doesn't happen when launching a process from inside a terminal session.
I may have identified the culprit. I had loads of "xprop" zombie processes, which hinted at the "maximus" extension I have been using to undecorate full-screen windows. Disabling this resolves the zombification issue. What remains then is only the original issue with Mono applications. These do not zombify, but they don't launch unless started from a console.
Most likely the recent Nvidia drivers are borked. It's not happening with Nouveau. Closing. For interested parties: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/633706/linux/recent-drivers-cause-applications-to-hang-not-start-at-all-or-compilation-failures/