Element breaks constantly showing an endless spinner

[konomikitten]

When I use Element on GNOME it breaks showing the endless spinner. This happens about 50% of the time when I start it and only started happening recently. This ends up with the session data breaking and needing to log back into the client. It doesn't seem to happen on my desktop that runs XFCE. Normally I'd report this to Element itself but because I already found an issue there telling me to report it against the Flatpak instead I'm reporting it here. The following issues seem related.

• Element shows session errors after being restarted during opening spinner element-hq/element-web#18625
• Endless spinner after upgrade to 1.11.23, element no longer usable (also, crashes) #345

[pezz]

Not just GNOME, seeing this on latest KDE as well. Completely nuking ~/.var/app/im.riot.Riot temporarily fixes it, but it's a pain because you lose settings, have to verify session again etc, then it just breaks again after a couple of runs.

[slagiewka]

Same experience. I could successfully log in, quit the app and then I'm greeted with log in screen again 🙃

[SISheogorath]

As pointed out here, have you checked that it's not running in background? element-hq/element-web#18625 (comment)

You can also check with:

flatpak ps

After closing Element if an instance of the flatpak remains.

[konomikitten]

As pointed out here, have you checked that it's not running in background? element-hq/element-web#18625 (comment)

Unfortunately for me Element was corrupting the session data as well, I did check multiple processes weren't running but I should've checked the logs. I haven't had the issue pop up while on Element 1.11.81.

Is anyone else still having this problem?

[kees-closed]

Yes. It feels a bit hopeless.

[konomikitten]

If you press Send logs and then Download logs the error Element is encountering should be listed.

[pezz]

This was good for a version or two but now seems broken again.

[SISheogorath]

It's probably the same problem as described here: #481 (comment)

[pezz]

Definitely not the same problem. Even if there's no other process running, it can refuse to start, and even if you verify that there's no process still running when you exit, it will just not run again later.

Very frustrating, and even worse is that it seems to work for "a while" then just mess up randomly later. No idea why.

Had it running after nuking all the data for 2 days, now it's simply broken again with the forever loading spinner.

[SISheogorath]

In this case a reproducer that works reliably with matrix.org would be very useful.

[pezz]

I don't use matrix.org but my own Synapse server. It's something to do with the Cache or Local Storage but I haven't been able to pin it down.

[pezz]

I've managed to fix this for myself. I have some very restrictive global overrides as defaults and they seem to be a bit over-zealous.

Using Flatseal I added org.freedesktop.login1 to the "Talks" section and also allowed Element access to the Session Bus.

It appears I'm my own worst enemy, sorry for the noise.