Comment 50 for bug 1574278

Thanks for the bump, I'd forgotten to update this bug.

I found the cause of the problem and fixed it for systems using Xorg. It was a race condition, and is affected by speed of computer, speed of graphics, other processes, and theme drawing. That's why it may not happen for some people. You can find my patch in the upstream bug report https://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13791 and my summary at Sugar Labs https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/4915

I'll be shipping the fix on the laptops we make at One Laptop per Child.

However, my fix was not tested on Wayland and caused AbiWord to fail differently under Wayland, and upstream (correctly) refused to accept the patch as is, and nobody seems to have done anything since.

I'm not using Wayland, and I'm not paid to support Wayland, so I'm unable to easily work further on the problem.

But if any of you really need it to work using Xorg (e.g. Lubuntu), my patch should be fine, and I'm happy to explain what the problem was in detail.

Upstream would obviously benefit from someone who can program C++ with GTK+ on both Xorg and Wayland. If this is you, please offer to help them. It has been almost two years since this problem first began, and it is slowly but surely destroying the usability of AbiWord. Sad to see the old girl go.