Thank you for the tip, however, portmaster leaves me with a small empty window indefinitely. There is a fix on their website but the /opt/safing folder doesn’t (yet) exist on my machine.
Looking at my terminal output I seem to have 2 problems:
(portmaster:49779): libayatana-appindicator-WARNING **: 10:00:08.909: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code.
I can do that but I’d have to get the glib package from the AUR. However, the portmaster icon works so this doesn’t seem to be critical.
The second issue is:
Could not create GBM EGL display: EGL_SUCCESS. Aborting...
[2026-04-14][07:55:31][portmaster::portmaster::websocket][DEBUG] Trying to connect to websocket endpoint
[2026-04-14][07:55:31][portmaster::portmaster::websocket][ERROR] failed to create portapi client: Connection refused (os error 111)
Since I’m running firejail the reason for this might be the missing firejail profile for portmaster. I tried: firejail --noprofile portmaster
but the issue remains.
Can you see an easy way to make the two apps work together or are they simply incompatible?
I have been playing with the portmaster in connection with the security topics.
All my tests is on unstable branch - so I could suspect there could be differences between stable and unstable - issues may have been solved with the iteration I was testing.
It makes no sense to run portmaster in a firejail.
According to the firejail man page firejail --noprofile portmaster should start portmaster outside the sandbox.
Switched from 2.0.0-2 from the repos to 2.0.0-6 in AUR.
What’s odd is that the icon showed yellow, a notification about downloading config files appeared and now the icon shows green with status ‘secured’, however, the UI stays blank.
The package is a stub - which loads the necessary files from the official distribution servers - so my thought is that your network configuration prevents portmaster from getting the files.
But I don’t understand why you must run it through firejail - that makes absolute no sense at all.
It works. For example it blocks connected devices on the wifi AP I’m running on the machine. If I use the Icon and ‘pause portmaster for a minute’ the devices connect to the AP again, for a minute.
However, the main window stays blank. Btw, I’m not the only one with this issue.
Followed instructions on their website to first completely uninstall/remove any left-overs, then reinstalled with their install-portmaster.sh script - issue persists.
Finally, followed the hint: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code. - issue persists
Thanks for putting so much effort in it.
By ‘giving up’ I meant that I’m running out of ideas. If anyone can point me to a fix I’m happy to have a go. Like your Tuxedo mine is also a Clevo (Schenker):
I’m starting to wonder if this might be caused by webkit2gtk-4.1 not playing well with the 475.xxx nvidia driver since I encountered similar blank windows in foliate and bookworm e-readers. They used to work but I had to move to coolreader a while ago. However, atril also requires the package and this works.
Trying a newer kernel or switching branches isn’t an option right now since I’m traveling in a couple of days, will have another go when I’m back.
the portmaster executable is a symlink to `/usr/lib/portmaster/portmaster-ui-start.sh
$ cat /usr/lib/portmaster/portmaster-ui-start.sh
#!/bin/bash
# WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 disables hardware acceleration in WebKit
# This prevents rendering issues on certain Linux systems
# with problematic GPU drivers or configurations. For Tauri 2 applications like Portmaster,
# this forces software rendering which provides more consistent behavior across different
# Linux distributions and hardware combinations.
WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 /usr/lib/portmaster/portmaster "$@"
I knew that once it’s run or the machine is rebooted it creates an entry in Control Center >> Sessions and Startup >> Application Autostart with the command usr/bin/portmaster --with-prompts --with-notifications --background. So I did a clean install and started it in terminal with:
$ cat /usr/bin/portmaster
#!/bin/bash
# WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 disables hardware acceleration in WebKit
# This prevents rendering issues on certain Linux systems
# with problematic GPU drivers or configurations. For Tauri 2 applications like Portmaster,
# this forces software rendering which provides more consistent behavior across different
# Linux distributions and hardware combinations.
WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 /usr/lib/portmaster/portmaster "$@"
and makes this permanent. Oh… I see…, well, must be magic because it does work now. Maybe WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=0 is only needed for the setup?
Got to go.
