#1147720 liferea: Crash GNOME/Wayland session when using tray-icon plugin

Package:
liferea
Source:
liferea
Description:
feed/news/podcast client with plugin support
Submitter:
Fierro Viejo
Date:
2026-09-14 17:09:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1147720#5
Date:
2026-09-14 17:06:33 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

I believe there is an issue where the GNOME/Wayland session crashes
completely and forces a logout shortly after starting Liferea with the
tray-icon plugin enabled.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Use Debian 13 (Trixie) with GNOME under a Wayland session.
2. Install 'liferea'
3. Enable the "Tray Icon" plugin inside Liferea.
4. After a short period of usage or background activity, the entire
   desktop environment crashes and returns to the GDM login screen.

Root cause analysis:
The plugin utilizes the deprecated 'libayatana-appindicator' library,
which seems to cause a memory/object reference failure under Wayland,
leading to a broken display pipe that kills the compositor.

Here are the relevant journalctl logs leading to the crash:

liferea[35320]: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code.
liferea[35320]: gtk_widget_get_scale_factor: assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
net.sourceforge.liferea[35320]: <sys>:0: Warning: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
liferea[35320]: Error flushing display: Broken pipe

Unfortunately without the tray-icon liferea is not usable for me because
I prefer my feed client to be running all the time in background. I also
tried with Ubuntu AppIndicators extension without success, so at the
moment I don't have a workaround besides trying another alternative.

Thank you for maintaining liferea and for your help with this issue!

Best regards,