Xfce Forum

wrh1728

Member

Registered: 2020-12-15

Posts: 50

Desktop freezing up on launching some apps

I am running XFCE 4.16 under Slackware 15.0. I have built and installed the ChatGPT and Claude desktop applications from Slackbuilds. When I try to launch either of them by clicking on their respective icons in Menu -> Accessories my XFCE desktop seizes up. Completely and irretrievably: even the clock applet in my top panel, which displays seconds, freezes up. The desktop becomes totally unresponsive to keyboard and mouse events. I cannot even reach other virtual terminals by means of Ctrl-Alt-F key. Short of rebooting the system, the only way out consists of ssh'ing from some other system and kill the desktop by hand.

The thing is, if instead of clicking on those icons I launch the applications from a terminal emulator, both applications start up without any problems and my XFCE desktop keeps working with no issues.

Another piece of data: after verifying that the Claude application is launching properly from a terminal emulator, I tried the following from a terminal emulator:

   nohup claude-desktop > /dev/null 2>&1 &

This does not cause my XFCE desktop to freeze up, but the application never starts properly: I just get a white rectangle that stays up indefinitely, not responding to any mouse nor keyboard events. Since the XFCE desktop is still active under these circumstance it is easy enough to get rid of the white rectangle by killing the process above by hand.

Something's obviously awry in the way these applications interact with my XFCE desktop, but  I have no clue as to what. Any insights on what the problem could be, and how to fix it would be much appreciated.

coeddie11

Banned

Registered: 2026-09-23

Posts: 1

Re: Desktop freezing up on launching some apps

This sounds like an Electron/Chromium GPU or compositor interaction-try launching with `--disable-gpu` (and compare `GDK_BACKEND=x11`), then check the applications’ stderr/logs and XFCE compositor settings to narrow down the culprit.

Last edited by coeddie11 (2026-09-23 11:29:26)

wrh1728

Member

Registered: 2020-12-15

Posts: 50

Re: Desktop freezing up on launching some apps

This sounds like an Electron/Chromium GPU or compositor interaction-try launching with `--disable-gpu` (and compare `GDK_BACKEND=x11`), then check the applications’ stderr/logs and XFCE compositor settings to narrow down the culprit.

Thanks. I have been obtaining feedback elsewhere and it goes in the same direction. I'll check it out.