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Fedora 44/45 and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (OCI) – Compatibility report: glycin sandbox, bubblewrap, GLX drisw, Zink pipeline #389

Description

@FerdinandoCavaliere

This is a compatibility report (not a bug).

Fedora 44, Fedora 45 (OCI images tested) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (OCI image tested) introduce graphics‑stack changes that appear structurally incompatible with proot + Termux:X11 + virgl on Android. Previous releases of these distros (Fedora 43, earlier Tumbleweed snapshots) worked correctly in the same environment.

Distro comparison (same environment, same script)

  • Debian 13 XFCE → works
  • Ubuntu 26.04 XFCE → works (after glycin loader fix already implemented in proot)
  • Fedora 43 XFCE → worked
  • Fedora 44 XFCE → crashes after last dnf upgrade
  • Fedora 45 OCI XFCE → crashes identically
  • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed OCI XFCE → Thunar freezes when opening any subfolder after latest zypper dup (previous snapshot worked correctly)

Observed issues (Fedora 44/45)

1. glycin SVG loader sandboxed via bubblewrap

Fedora uses glycin in a sandboxed mode requiring:

  • user namespaces
  • mount namespaces
  • seccomp
  • systemd user session
  • bubblewrap

These features cannot be emulated by proot.
Result: pixbuf loaders fail, GTK cannot load icons, XFCE crashes.

2. GLX “drisw” fallback fails

Termux:X11 does not support drisw.
Result: GLX context creation fails, compositor cannot start.

3. Zink forced as primary renderer

Fedora forces Zink as the default Mesa renderer.
Mali GPUs do not meet Zink’s Vulkan feature requirements.
Result: Zink fails → virgl fallback → llvmpipe → crash.

4. systemd user session required

XFCE attempts to use systemd user session, which is not available in proot.
Result: multiple session services fail.

5. WNCK crash due to missing icon surfaces

Missing icon surfaces (due to glycin/bubblewrap failures) cause WNCK to abort.

Additional confirmation: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (post-update)

After the latest zypper dup, Tumbleweed shows a similar regression:

  • XFCE starts correctly
  • Thunar opens the home directory
  • but freezes with infinite spinner when entering any subdirectory (including small folders)
  • previous Tumbleweed snapshot (backup) worked correctly with the same script and same environment

This suggests that recent Mesa/Zink/GTK changes in rolling distributions introduce rendering paths that proot cannot emulate, causing file managers to freeze when generating directory views.

Conclusion

Fedora 44/45 introduce a graphics pipeline (glycin sandbox + bubblewrap + GLX drisw + Zink + systemd user session) that cannot currently run under proot.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, after the latest Mesa/Zink updates, shows similar incompatibility symptoms (file manager freeze).
This is not a proot bug, but a compatibility regression caused by new graphics stack requirements in modern distributions.

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