Troubleshooting & How-Tos 📡 🔍 Linux

Fixing a Blank Article Pane in NewsFlash

Not sure what changed on the system (it’s Fedora, they publish updates daily*), but the RSS/Atom feed reader (which I recommend) stopped displaying articles when I opened it up today. The article pane was completely white, but oddly enough if I hovered over an article with links, the URL preview would show up.

Anyway, it’s not a unique issue, and I found the workaround in a reply to a bug report on the project:

nothing in newsflash changed since may. try setting WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 in flatseal.
– @JanGernert

It worked! But I didn’t know what flatseal was or where to add the setting, and it took me a few minutes to look that up. A few minutes that I figured I’d save you.

  1. Flatseal is a GUI utility to adjust permissions (and system-related settings) for Flatpaks you have on your system. It’s available as a Flatpak itself, but since Fedora provides a system package I figured I’d rather install that one.
sudo dnf install flatseal
  1. The setting isn’t one of the many toggles that will show up for NewsFlash. It’s an environment variable that you need to add. Scroll down to the Environment section for NewsFlash, then click on the + button and paste this into the text field:
WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1
  1. Restart NewsFlash, and it should display articles again!