Experiences running 8.0.0 AppImage on Ubuntu Lunar (23.04)

[Jonathan Kamens]

I decided to try out the 8.0.0 pre-release AppImage on the three 
machines on which I use digiKam, because I was unable to run 7.9.0 or 
7.10.0 on these machines because it kept segfaulting.

I eventually was able to get digiKam to launch on all three machines, 
but there was some bumps and challenges along the way which I am sharing 
here because this might be useful to the developers, and because it 
would be interesting to hear if others have run into similar issues.

On laptop1, digiKam started, but it took several minutes to start up 
each time, during most of which the splash screen was displaying 
"Loading tools..." and the app appeared to be talking to the database an 
awful lot. The first time seemed longer. Strace output from that first 
invocation (access to thumbnails DB) seemed to suggest that perhaps it 
was regenerating all thumbnails on startup.

On laptop2, the first time I started it, it did nothing for several 
minutes and then popped up a message which said, "You have insufficient 
privileges on the database. Following privileges are not assigned to 
you: [this is blank, no privileges are listed] Check your privileges on 
the database and restart digiKam."

The second time, it got to the splash screen, but got stuck there for a 
very long time, like a half hour, much longer than on laptop1. Judging 
by what showed up in top and strace, there were short bursts where the 
digikam process was busy and talking to the database, interspersed with 
longer periods during which it was idle while waiting for something. The 
timestamp on my thumbnails-digikam.db file kept getting updated, so I 
suspect that it was rebuilding the thumbnail database, in which case the 
delays may have been lags talking to the fileserver that the pictures 
are on. Having said that, I'm not sure why the delays are so much longer 
on this machine than on the other machine that was also doing this over 
WiFi to the same fileserver, unless for some reason this particular 
laptop has slower connectivity to the fileserver than the other one. 
This does seem possible since I noticed when mounting the filesystem on 
this machine that the mount took much longer.

Also on laptop2, the splash screen is much smaller than it should be and 
the fonts on the splash screen are so small that they are virtually 
unreadable. I thought this might be an Xorg fractional scaling issue 
since that's a new feature and I believe still experimental, but I 
turned off fractional scaling and restarted digiKam and saw the same 
issue, and then I logged out and logged back in with Wayland and again 
saw the same issue.

When it finally started up, it popped up the dialog telling me it needed 
to download facial recognition files, but clicking the "Download" button 
seemed to have no effect at least for a while, and GNOME kept popping up 
its ""digikam" is not responding, Force Quit / Wait" dialog window. The 
download finally happened and then the main window interface was responsive.

The third time I started up digiKam on laptop2, it still took a while at 
"Loading tools..." but much less time and the timestamp on my thumbnails 
DB wasn't being updated. Other things I noticed:

  * After the splash screen went away there was like a 15-second delay
    before the main window came up.
  * After closing the main window there was like a 15-second delay
    before the digikam process (which I launched by executing the
    AppImage file) fully exited.

Finally, on my primary desktop computer, which is connected to the 
fileserver via cable rather than wifi and therefore has much faster 
connectivity, digiKam started up fast without any apparent issue. Since 
I've run digiKam here more recently than on the laptops, it's possible 
that the thumbnail database didn't need to rebuild here, i.e., my 
suspicion that there was something in the upgrade to 8.0.0 that caused 
the thumbnail DB to need rebuilding may be incorrect.

Hope this is useful.

   jik


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