Most of the time, when I click on the Timeline Menu or Playlist Menu or Jobs Menu icons, no menu pops up. It seems like perhaps the menu has popped up “invisibly” since it acts like it is waiting on the menu input before it responds to other actions (e.g., clicking elsewhere on the screen does not respond at first - as if the click dismisses the pop-up menu - but then responds correctly when clicked again).
What is your operating system?
Debian 13
What is your Shotcut version (see Help > About Shotcut)?
25.08.16 installed via Flatpak
Can you repeat the problem? If so, what are the steps?
Repeatable but slightly intermittent: Open Shotcut and click on any of the menu icons noted above. Once in a while, the menu pops up, but most of the time it does not. It does not matter whether there is content in the playlist, timeline, etc.; the pop-up menu almost never shows.
Weird; I have not seen this before, but I have not tried Debian 13 yet. Do you know if you are using Wayland or not? That probably makes a difference. I believe it is by default.
I was able to make a quick test on Ubuntu 24.04 with default GNOME Shell on Wayland in a VM, and it worked OK.
With respect to repeatabiliy, does it reoccur even if you restart Shotcut or reboot? The question is more about how a developer might be able to reproduce it. If the problem is only occurring intermittently in the session when you made the screen recording, it is not really repeatable except under rare, unknown circumstances.
Please test this:
flatpak run --nosocket=fallback-x11 --socket=x11 --nosocket=wayland org.shotcut.Shotcut
TL;DR: Running Shotcut using the command you asked me to test completely solves the problem. In terms of my needs, problem solved!
But in case this reveals some corner issue that you need or want to chase, here is a longer answer:
Yes, the system is running Wayland by default. I am not sure when this problem surfaced, as I typically right-click rather than use the menus - so I don’t know if the problem goes back to any earlier versions of Shotcut or of Debian.
Here is additional info that may or may not be relevant:
System Details Report
Report details
Date generated: 2025-08-25 16:32:25
Hardware Information:
Hardware Model: HP HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15-dk0xxx
Memory: 32.0 GiB
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-9300H × 8
Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)
Graphics 1: NV167
Disk Capacity: 1.0 TB
Software Information:
Firmware Version: F.60
OS Name: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)*
OS Build: 20250517T091304Z
OS Type: 64-bit
GNOME Version: 48
Windowing System: Wayland
Kernel Version: Linux 6.12.41+deb13-amd64
*I’m not sure why it is reporting Debian 12 Bookworm here, but I presume it is because I upgraded to Debian 13 Trixie from Bookworm, rather than doing a fresh install.
Results of running uname -a:
Linux 6.12.41+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.12.41-1 (2025-08-12) x86_64 GNU/Linux
The system includes an nVidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU; I am running the nouveau driver rather than the nVidia driver. (The latter does not support the third monitor when I connect to a docking station.)
Let me know if there is any other information that would be helpful.
Yeah, I doubt we can do anything about it. It is a problem between Qt, Wayland, and your graphics driver. I generally do not use nouveau as I’ve had bad experience with it.
What I will think about is some easier way for people to use X11 other than that command line and removing the wayland integration.
I have typically used the nVidia driver in the past, but when I went to a third monitor on the docking station, I discovered the limitation. That may just be that I am doing something wrong with the nVidia driver! But I discovered that switching to the nouveau driver allows me to use the third monitor, so that is what I have done for now.
I do need to use the nVidia driver when I run a program that needs to use the CUDA library - as far as I can tell, there is no way to access that via nouveau - so the next time I have to switch drivers, I’ll try to remember to run Shotcut without the extra switches and see what happens.
thanks for your help here, solved the problem for me, too.
I have the same problem on fedora 42 with wayland. No matter if I use the RPM Version from fedora repository or the flatpak. The error I get, when trying to open those menus is the following:
...
No appenders associated with category qt.qpa.wayland
[Warning] <> Creating a popup with a parent, QWidgetWindow(0x55cbd2fc60e0, name="MainWindowWindow") which does not match the current topmost grabbing popup, QWidgetWindow(0x55cbd833baa0, name="QMenuClassWindow") With some shell surface protocols, this is not allowed. The wayland QPA plugin is currently handling it by setting the parent to the topmost grabbing popup. Note, however, that this may cause positioning errors and popups closing unxpectedly. Please fix the transient parent of the popup.
Maybe this helps to sort out the problems.
In my opinion it’s OK to fallback to XWayland as with your command line quick solution, in case of errors like this. But in the long run supporting native Wayland seems to be a better way. Actually the numbers of wayland only distributions are growing, so removing wayland integration might not be the best step for the future.
I reproduced this on Fedora today with Flatpak or distro package. I tried some changes but could not get it to work. It is working fine in the 25.08 versions of the portable, AppImage, or Snap because those are using Qt 6.4.3 (including Qt’s wayland plugins). Therefore, I think it is a bug in QToolButton or QMenu. There are only a few obvious things to try to change other than replacing that widget with something completely different, which I am not willing to do. Qt 6.9.2 just came out, and we will see if the problem is fixed with that. There is hope because I think it is this bug: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-137467
The workaround for the user is to simply keep trying by clicking. It is intermittent and will show eventually. Other workarounds including using a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut, if available, to reach whatever you are looking for.
I upgraded our builds to Qt 6.9.2, and testing the portable, I think it is much improved but not perfect: around 90% success rate on this machine.
Here is an AppImage daily build if you want to try it and compare with my experience. Please treat this as a beta as there have been some big changes that are only lightly tested. (It also includes a fix if you have AppImageLauncher installed.)
Thanks, Dan. I agree that this bug is in QT, not in Shotcut. Hopefully they will sort it out soon.
Thanks for your continued work and testing on this! I am continually impressed and amazed at how quickly you respond. Thank you for such an outstanding NLVE!
thank you for looking into this issue. Yes you are right, it’s QT related and with your daily build the menus are showing up, sometimes. So until QT will work better with wayland it seems that the best is to fall back to XWayland, with your provided commandline options.
Thanks for your help and the great work on this great software.
Edit: For people running shotcut on fedora 42 installed from the fedora repos (RPM), you can start shotcut from terminal with the following command to force using XWayland. I have performance issues in the preview window with the flatpak version. So I am using the rpm-version.
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb shotcut
Or you can copy the *.desktop file and change the EXEC Line.
I had to logout and login again on my fedora system to make the change work. Shotcut then starts on XWayland, when launched through the Icon in the application menu.
Very interesting. Since the .deb repository was always a few versions behind, I started using AppImage several years ago. Over time, though, I got tired of the poor integration of AppImage into the desktop, so for the past few months I’ve been using the flatpak version. Thus far, it has worked flawlessly (other than this menu bug, not related to flatpak). I will be interested to see if I encounter any problems down the road.