#226 SCID 5.0.2 on Debian 12, focus on textfields not working as expected (again) plus font problems

[Ruggiero A]

Related to this issue (https://sourceforge.net/p/scid/bugs/221/), that wasn't truly solved when properly installing NVIDIA drivers (just a coincidence, now the drivers still work but SCID has the same bugs, besides my laptop is double GPU and shouldn't even use Nvidia GPU when using SCID).

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Software version:

SCID version I am using: 5.0.2 (8th Feb 2024)

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OS and PC:

OS: Debian 12 with everything updated, using right now kernel 6.1.0-15-amd64, since the 6.1.0-18-amd64 is giving me issues with Nvidia drivers.

Display: 2.560 x 1.600 on 16'', scale 200% (this likely arises some visual bugs in the program)

Other PC specs if it may be relevant:
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-13650HX
GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, with 8 GB GDDR6
RAM: 32 GB, 2 units of 16 GB, of memory DDR5 at 4.800 MHz
Storage: SSD M.2 PCIe NVMe, 1 TB

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How to reproduce the issue:

• (for the font size problem, using scale 200% or more in the displays settings is a prerequisite)
• just open SCID and some font sizes are very huge, I also don't see a setting to change them since they do not appear listed to me in the font preferences.
• clicking textfields will not succeed into being able to type. If it is succeeding when opening the application, it eventually stops being succeded, after some normal use of the application (opening a database, opening some game files, going over the notation, etc.) (NB: this issue may also regard the key inputs on the game notation such as the arrow to scroll moves, not just the textfield controls, and it happens in the same fashion)
• by going into preferences, also here the fonts are not displayed properly, likely still due to 200% scaling in the OS (a must when you have an high-res laptop monitor)

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Screenshots:

You can see from "Screenshot from 2024-02-15 12-36-02.png" that the label "Event: etc." is not fully visible as the height of the container of the UI elements is likely not enough, besides I find that font to be somewhat too big.

Meanwhile, in the "Screenshot from 2024-02-15 12-39-46.png", you can still see the text displayed is too big (this problem on font size appeared in the latest version, did not occur in the previous one in my use), and when the selected text in the textfields highlights in gray (as in the screenshot) instead of blue, I cannot type in any text in the textfield. This problem does not just arise in textfields, but in almost any UI control when the keyboard is involved, e.g., in the game notation to scroll moves with the arrows the same issue arises (that is, key input is not received by the application and nothing happens).

In "Screenshot from 2024-02-15 12-49-31.png", you can see further issues with displaying fonts when the UI is shown with scale; this specific issue happened to me as well as in the SCID version before the latest one.

At last, in "Screenshot from 2024-02-15 12-51-31.png" I disabled the display scaling and the problems arised with the font sizes shown in the other screenshots disappear, so this suggests in my opinion that scaling support is a problem in the application.

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Workarounds

How to workaround the textfield focus problem: e.g. using Alt+Tab to switch over another window/application, and then using it again to switch back to SCID, analogously as the previus issue opened.

How to workaround the font size/display problem: disabling scaling, but this makes the application more straining to the eyes since everything is very small-sized with respect to screen size, in SCID just as in everything else.

Therefore both workarounds are not solutions.

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Other notes

Textfield focus issue never occurred to me in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It occurred on the very first time on Debian OS, I don't know if this is relevant, but if the problem can't be replicated in more common Linux distros like Ubuntu, then it's important to mind that the behavior on Debian may present differently.

Font size issue may not happen in the same way on Windows, as for instance Windows supports by default more scales, like 150% instead of jumping to 200% from 100%; but even at the same scale, I do not expect Windows version to behave in the same way as the Linux version.

I did not ever use SCID application on Ubuntu on this specific PC (with high-res), so some of the things I reported may still or may not apply on a more common Linux distro like Ubuntu.

[Ruggiero A]

For clarity on the font size problem, I will also add a screenshot of the application full screen when scale is 200%

[Ruggiero A]

Ok, maybe the focus problem has definitively to do with Nvidia drivers. Still have to confirm it though.

TL;DR:

• When SCID is buggy as I described it such as being often incapable to focus on text/other widgets or input from the keyboard, other subtle anomalies happen like menu flickering when hovered with cursor. When SCID isn't buggy, none of these anomalies happen, although the ones related to scaling may still happen.
• The problem seems to be indeed related to Nvidia drivers
• x86_64-545.29.06 is the only driver version that I found out to be working. Installing Nvidia drivers on Debian with apt may install older drivers which will not work properly
• If the Nvidia driver is not working (e.g. test with nvidia-smi tool to tell) or it's not recent enough, even when it's working, the problem will arise.
• It's very easy to have an Nvidia driver that stops working: for me it happened just updating stuff in my OS with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. After the reboot with the latest kernel (6.1.0-18-amd64), my Nvidia drivers were not working anymore and SCID become again bugged. After several re-installations and still not getting them working, I rebooted from an older kernel (6.1.0-15-amd64 first, then 6.1.0-17-amd64) where now the driver was working, but it was not a "good" version (e.g. the aforementioned x86_64-545.29.06), therefore SCID was still buggy and it was non-trivial to guess that I had to also use specifically that driver version.
• Nvidia drivers installed on Debian by apt likely will not be recent enough (this may strongly differ in Ubuntu which uses different sources and makes also easier to get Nvidia drivers working), therefore this problem should be enough easy to replicate on Debian provided using one of the affected GPUs (can't tell them all; mine is RTX 4060 Laptop); if the problem doesn't arise in Ubuntu it's likely not weird since Ubuntu will facilitate the installation of more recent drivers.
• If the GPU+kernel configuration is "wrong", most if not all SCID versions are affected, this was heavily checked (read full recap for details).
• The huge text problem when displays scale is 200% is likely not to attribute to the last ELF binary but rather some files in its folder (read complete recap); some minor issues with 200% scale however are still present, similarly to say "Screenshot from 2024-02-15 12-49-31.png" in the post's uploaded screenshots.
• I cannot say if the problem's root depends more from Nvidia drivers, Tcl/Tk library, or SCID itself, but I think it still deserves investigation as the affected portion of Linux users may be not negligible and setting up my configuration (and knowing which version to use for kernel + gpu driver version) was not trivial.
• In my opinion these problems should be either addressed and fixed or heavily disclaimed to prevent a lot of frustration in a subset of the Linux users.

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Full recap after ton of troubleshooting:

• I heavily tested several SCID versions, 5.0.2, 5.0.1, SCIDvsPC, older SCID like 4.7.0 to check if it was related to the newest SCID versions only or if it could be a problem of the environment, and I tested SCID 5.0.2 multiple times among which: prebuilt .tar.gz from this website, from flatpak, and I also built it by myself using CMake by source code

• All SCID versions were affected by the bug, with the exception of the "huge font" size problem which apparently is linked only to the sourceforge folder and didn't happen elsewhere (nor swapping my own 5.0.2 binary with the previous binary of the older (5.0.1)'s version folder)

• The only way I succeeded into making the focus bug disappear was installing again a specific version of Nvidia drivers. The one x86_64-545.29.06 is the only one I could get SCID working without such bug. If you install on Debian (may be different in Ubuntu due to different available versions per distro, Debian by default does not offer the most recent software) the Nvidia drivers by like apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree, they may not be a "good" version for SCID to be unbugged. I had to purge all of my Nvidia drivers and install specificaly 545.29.06 version as I found none else to be working with SCID.

• As if it was sadly not complicated enough, and this point is not completely related to SCID, The latest 6.1.0-18-amd64 kernel in my configuration made every Nvidia driver just unworking. nvidia-smi emitted it could not communicate with the GPU. Therefore my SCID went from not being bugged to be bugged again, merely by doing an apt upgrade which updated my kernel as well and after reboot my Nvidia driver was not working properly and SCID with it. I am therefore using right now 6.1.0-17-amd64 kernel to get both the Nvidia drivers and SCID properly working. I am not sure however if it has to do with the newer kernel itself or a partially broken installation on my side.

Therefore I recommend that there can be either a disclaimer on proper Nvidia driver's installation and version to use SCID properly, or that the issue is worked through so that this issue does not happen on the aforementioned configurations. Because getting my current configuration working is I think very user-unfriendly even for the average Linux user and for me it required hours of blind guessing.

Ubuntu users are less likely to be affected as they will get most likely a more recent version from Nvidia drivers and they are also more likely to see them working by default with respect to Debian users which may have to do more manual work themselves since Debian is just worse supported by Nvidia and as if it was not enough, even just having Secure Boot enabled is enough to make Nvidia drivers not working (unless they were manually user-signed, which I did) and therefore SCID application buggy.

Having nvidia-smi that reports a working communication with the Nvidia driver was, in my experience, necessary but not sufficient to get SCID not buggy, since, again, having a driver version which is not enough up to date (e.g. x86_64-545.28.02 which is not that old either) may get SCID buggy even when such driver properly works. The driver must work and be as well sufficiently recent.

NVIDIA/Debian users are IMHO more likely to be affected as it's a combo that often arises more problems, compared to say AMD users or NVIDIA/Ubuntu users.

I do not know if the problem is to be more investigated into Nvidia drivers themselves, Tcl/Tk library, or specifically SCID application. But in my opinion, a non-negligible portion of Linux users may be exposed to the same issues that I had.

In conclusions, another symptom of a buggy SCID is that the menu is also flickering when hovered with the cursor (this as well happening over all the tested SCID versions). Such symptom disappears in a configuration that gets SCID to work properly, such as my last configuration.

[Ruggiero A]

I suspected it was related to NVIDIA driver version after I installed SCID from flatpak, where I saw that it downloaded as dependency something related to my specific NVIDIA driver version at that time installed. Then I proceeded to install my previous (first and only) exact driver version where SCID used to work properly, and it again proceeded to work properly. I don't think I would have easily guessed it if not for flatpak, since I had nonetheless a working Nvidia driver even before the last re-installation.

[Ruggiero A]

**Update: **

From the PC which I have a GTX 1060 (as opposed to the laptop with a RTX 4060 Laptop) and where SCID works on Ubuntu, SCID is almost completely unusable (keyboard input does not work to move in a file, you can't search games due to focus issues and here not even the alt-tab workaround helps) from another distro; I installed latest Kali Linux; nor nvidia driver versions 525.147.05 or 535.161.08 do work well with SCID. It is not easy to install another version, because the 535.161.08 is the latest provided from Kali's repo. Sadly it is not easy to further change such drivers due to compatibility issues.

Therefore this is the second computer for which I am incurring in this bug, and similarly as with the other, it does not appear to be a hardware problem, rather a software/compatibility issue, since both PCs happen to run SCID well under the right circumstances (the proper Nvidia driver version is the only variable I found relevant in this regard).

Again, I do not know why there appears to be such weird issues with Nvidia driver versions.

I confirm again that Ubuntu is most likely not to raise such issues, since everything works fine even after it gets updates of the Nvidia drivers. Other Debian-based distros should be used IMHO for the troubleshooting.