Multiple apps not working (on an external monitor) after recent Pacman updates

General system Applications
1

I recently returned to school after a month away, where I have my monitor. It is plugged into my laptop (AMD integrated +RTX 2060) via a type-C port (as the HDMI port was making Arch laggy, which had something to do with it being hardwired to my integrated GPU).

NOTE: This issue occurs ONLY when I use the monitor. On my laptop display everything works great. And xrandr --output DP-1-0 --primary --mode 2560x1440 --scale 1x1 --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1080 --left-of DP-1-0 is how I set up my displays.

Now, with Picom ON or even OFF (I have i3 and blur set up), the following apps don’t work:

  1. Steam (crashes on startup)
  2. Vscode (crashes on startup)
  3. Zotero (crashes on startup)
  4. VLC (audio works, but the video is a black screen)
  5. Any other random app I try opening (for example, p3x-onenote)
    Note: All apps I mentioned were installed from the AUR

Please help me fix this; I’m getting frustrated and thinking about life a month back when everything ran smoothly. I’ll be happy to share any debug info you guys might think would be worth looking into.

2

Open a terminal, try running, say, vscode and see if it returns anything helpful.

3

Here’s a snippet of the code --verbose output around the moment vs-code crashes:

[main 2025-02-06T21:30:57.596Z] CodeWindow: detected unresponsive
[0207/030107.391945:ERROR:directory_reader_posix.cc(43)] opendir /home/stormageddon/.config/Code/Crashpad/attachments/483a8cde-ac56-4ede-90c3-05f2520782fd: No such file or directory (2)
[37158:0207/030107.406546:ERROR:command_buffer_proxy_impl.cc(289)] GPU state invalid after WaitForTokenInRange.
[36948:0207/030107.412783:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(1007)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
[36948:0207/030107.412821:WARNING:gpu_process_host.cc(1441)] The GPU process has crashed 3 time(s)
[57606:0207/030107.682856:WARNING:sandbox_linux.cc(430)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process.
[36948:0207/030107.685765:WARNING:gpu_process_host.cc(1029)] Reinitialized the GPU process after a crash. The reported initialization time was 266 ms
4

I’m having the same issue. It seems to be with apps that have hardware acceleration on. I’m running into this on my laptop that has 2 gpus, could this be a case of the app trying to use the wrong one?

5

I rebooted into the bios and changed the display to use the integrated GPU only & that fixed the issue for me. Not a great long term fix, but at least it’s working for now.

1 Like
6

That might be it actually, I suspected it had something to do with the GPUs. For your case, are you also getting this issue when you try to run stuff on an external monitor? I ask as when I don’t have my monitor connected, all these apps work fine on my laptop display.

7

For me, I installed nvidia-prime from the AUR, and if I run these applications using prime-run I don’t get the issue. What is weird is that prime-run fails to run vscode on the nvidia-gpu but vscode still runs normally (compared to running vscode without using prime-run which crashes it)