🎮 Unity, Linux, and the Mysterious Selection Menu Crash

🎮 Unity, Linux, and the Mysterious Selection Menu Crash

TLDR; 

Running unity on i3wm + Nvidia. Selection menu crashes unity. 
Entering Full screen fixes the issue. 

Github fix:

https://github.com/tesq0/i3-unity-fix

I’ve been hopping distros lately, experimenting with different window managers and environments, and ran into a strange (and surprisingly stubborn) issue with Unity Hub and the Unity Editor. If you’re developing on Linux and scratching your head over Unity randomly crashing when opening selection menus—this one’s for you.

🐧 The Setup

Let’s rewind.

I first installed Arch Linux with Hyprland (a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor). I grabbed unityhub from the AUR, launched it, and everything seemed to work fine—at least at first.

But then came the crash.

💥 The Problem

Every time I opened any kind of selection menu inside Unity (see Figure 1), the editor would freeze and crash within seconds. The menu itself didn’t render correctly—it was either completely black or looked like some kind of corrupted buffer.

🖼 Figure 1: Selection menu inside Unity – just a blank void or glitchy mess before crash.

Okay. So I uninstalled both Unity Hub and Unity completely, and decided to try the Flatpak version, assuming sandboxing might help.

And surprisingly—it did!

🔁 The Fedora Twist

Later, I switched over to Fedora and installed Unity Hub from Flathub again (since there’s no official RPM or repo support for Unity Hub on Fedora).

But guess what? The issue came back.

This time, I was using i3 with Xorg instead of Wayland. Figured maybe the lack of a compositor was causing the rendering issues—after all, the selection menu wasn’t rendering anything before crashing.

So I installed and configured picom (a compositor for Xorg). Still no luck. I nuked the Flatpak install, reinstalled it again fresh, but the issue persisted.

🎯 The Random Fix

In a moment of random curiosity—or desperation—I switched my primary monitor to the one where I was actually using Unity (originally, Unity was on the secondary display).

Boom. It worked.

Suddenly, the selection menus rendered just fine, and no more crashing.

🧠 Lessons Learned

I’ve been using Linux long enough to know that sometimes the bugs aren’t in the logs—they’re in the way things interact unexpectedly.

Here’s a recap of what I’ve learned (and what might help you if you're facing the same):

• 🛠️ Unity on Wayland (Hyprland) + AUR version = Menu crash

• 🔐 Unity via Flatpak on Arch = Worked fine

• 💥 Unity via Flatpak on Fedora + i3 + no compositor = Menu crash

• 🧪 Adding compositor (picom) = No change

• 🖥️ Running Unity on secondary monitor = crash

• ✅ Making secondary monitor the primary = Works fine

📌 Conclusion

If your Unity Editor is crashing when opening selection menus on Linux, check which monitor you’re using it on. Sometimes the fix isn’t in the logs or the sandboxing—it’s in how the app interacts with your display setup.

Until the next weird bug,