Flatpak installed apps only display titlebar and white screen

Support Snap/Flatpak
1

Installed flatpak with pamac install flatpak libpamac-flatpak-plugin

Don’t tend to use flatpaks unless I have to but the only way I can get Proton Mail and Proton Pass installed on the two arch-based systems I’ve tried is through flathub, when I open both apps all I get is the titlebar and a white screen

Decided to try some other flatpaks to see if I got the same thing, and this is the weird part

If I install browser flatpaks the only ones that don’t display the same behaviour are firefox-based, any others just the titlebar and white screen, they also won’t close, I have to list their processes with the ps command and kill them all

The other few apps I installed just to see if the work opened fine, seems to only be affecting the Proton app and non-Firefox based browsers

I tried removing and reinstalling all the apps and flatpak itself, same issue, also tried sudo flatpak repair --resintall-all, made no difference

Incidentally, I’ve been ‘test-driving’ a variety of distros because I want to get away from opensuse as my ‘daliy driver’ cos I really don’t like the way it’s gone with Leap 16, the only two distros I’ve experienced this issue with are the two Arch-based ones I’ve tried, Manjaro and Endeavour

Makes me wonder if it’s a known issue with Arch-based systems, did find a lot of posts about flatpak issues when I searched the forum but the closest one to this was one about ‘apps not working’, where they weren’t opening at all

I did wonder if it might be GPU related, though I’d expect more wide-ranging issues if it was down to the card

This machine has an Nvidia card, a Geforce GTX 1070 that’s always ran well enough on both the opensource and proprietary drivers on a range of distros

2

what does flatpak run --verbose [app.name.here] says

3

Could be video related indeed. I just tested several flatpaks, everything works on xfce x11 build in intel.

Inxi would be useful (i hope you did read the welcome template how to ask and post)…oops it seems the welcome template in the composer is only in the pure support category and not in the subcategories @admins maybe fix?

@Ecky

4

inxi -zv8 would help a lot but going on what you’ve provided there’s a known issue with NVIDIA cards affecting flatpak applications that causes similar symptoms to what you describe. I’m not exactly sure what the solution is, though some have reported forcing the environment helps at the cost of performance.

For example: Linux-specific performance, graphical, or crashing issues [MEGA-ISSUE] · Issue #3057 · modrinth/code · GitHub

This may get it running but I’d limit it to the app rather than applying it globally.

export WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
export GDK_BACKEND=x11
5

One thing worth checking to narrow it down: is the session Wayland or X11 at login? The proprietary Nvidia driver has known DMABUF renderer glitches under Wayland with GTK/WebKit flatpaks, which fits the ‘titlebar plus white area’ description, and Firefox uses a different rendering path so it slips past. If switching to an X11 session at the greeter makes the same apps render, that points to exactly what bananamangodog described, and the WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 workaround can be scoped per app with flatpak override rather than set globally.

6

I can report it’s nothing so broad. I have run two or three apps installed as flatpaks on three different Manjaro machines (two Intel and one AMD) for a couple of years, and I have never had the issue you describe – although the flatpaks I use are not those you mentioned. All my machines have integrated GPUs, and I used to use X11 but switched to Wayland early in 2026, and the flatpak apps work fine in every way with just a miniscule delay when launching.

7

An adittion to what Bananamangodog said: if you do not want to use the command line for the environment overrides like

flatpak override --user --env=VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE full.application.Name

You can use the flatpak gui flatseal

8

with an NVIDIA GPU?

Also from what I understand of the issue, it entirely depends on how the flatpak is packaged.

9

No, with Intel and AMD GPUs. Sorry if I misunderstood.