Flatpaks like Stellarium, Vish, etc. fail, when certain font is needed

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Hello!
I had a sudden problem after updating / upgrading since 24th of September:
I used to work with Stellarium and Vish but after the installation of the ".34"-Kernel and certain other libraries, Vish didn't start at all and Stellarium crashed all of a sudden when choosing the "Settings Menu (F2)".
Both flatpaks. So I decided to purge them from my system (Zorin 18.1) and reinstall them. But still the same outcome appeared.
So I went analysing what's happening and even the terminal output did not unveil the problem.
As I read the kernel chrash log it clearly claimed that a specific font cannot be used because of a problem accessing it.
So all I did was to remove the "fontconfig" by typing:

rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig

and there you are: both applications are working again like a charm.

But! After shutting down and restarting next morning the problem still remains.

I rebulit the fontcache by typing

sudo fc-cache -f -v

and - once again - I removed the font configuration file by using

rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig

Again everything works fine again.

So I assume there is a severe probem by using the fontconfig file (timing of the kernel? Glitch in a certain library?)

It would be great to fix this again, because Zorin is - apart from that problem - working very well to me!

Kind regards,
Klaus Ruthmann, Germany

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Hi, this is thanks to Canonical moving away from Webkit 4.0 to 4.1:

Personally I avoid Flatpaks (and Snaps) and Wayland compositor like the plague.

I have asked @community_moderators to start a specific thread for the 23.09.2026 issues as the previous pinned thread was down to a faulty Flatpak library, 'bubblewrap':

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Thank you very much for your reply!

So - obviously there is no simple glitch in the code but a substantial problem to it.

Well - it would have been nice, for a change, to have had an operating system that just worked.

Too bad.

Please tell me: are you thinking about moving away from Zorin or what kind of solution are you practising to avoid snaps and flatpaks?

A lovely Sunday morning from Germany...

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Guten Tag! (My Deutsche is extremely limited!)

I moved away from Zorin after I accidentally erased my 2015 version following a family argument. During lockdown I used FerenOS to begin with then moved to Devuan.

The only two distributions I use these days are KDE Plasma versions of PCLOS Debian (my daily driver) and Q4OS.

I used to dislike PeppermintOS as it was Google-centric but currently has Debian 12 and Devuan based versions I have just learned with minimum Apps to allow user choice. Not sure on what DE it uses.

I would also suggest taking a look at MX-Linux 25.1 KDE Plasma and Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 and then do a post install of kde-standard.

There was a potential font fix in that Discourse thread, see if it works for you. But this should not have been released by Canonical without thorough testing - perhaps they are mutating into the Microslop Borg one-of-eleven.

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clearing ~/.cache/fontconfig only covers host apps. flatpaks keep their own under ~/.var/app.

id try:
-rm -rf ~/.var/app/*/cache/fontconfig
-flatpak run --command=fc-cache org.stellarium.Stellarium -f

if it comes back after every reboot, chrome/webkit has been rewriting font caches on ubuntu lately. worth checking if chrome ran overnight before it broke again.

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