[Bug]: Stuck First Launch

[raniaamina]

Before reporting

• I'm on the latest release and the issue still happens.
• I searched existing issues and didn't find a duplicate.

What happened?

Just try in Linux and Mac, at first launch Mac Arm show progress, but in Linux (I use Debian with NVIDIA RTX 5070Ti) seem stuck without any progress shown. All deps writen in docs already installed, also no log in console.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open stemdeck
2. Just wait for stuck

Operating system

Linux

StemDeck version

0.15.2

How did you install it?

Linux tar.gz

Logs / screenshots

No response

[thcp]

Hi,

Could you please try the pre release? https://github.com/stemdeckapp/stemdeck/releases/tag/v0.16.1

[raniaamina]

Hi @thcp,

The issue still happen.

[thcp]

Hey @raniaamina , just to say that it's not forgotten :)

Could you also please provide your gpu series and Linux distribution ?

[raniaamina]

I mentioned in first post :")
I use Debian Sid with NVIDIA RTX 5070Ti.
Just test running via source code, this series need latest torch cuda130 to work well. Not sure this caused by this different lib version or not, since the apps just stuck with no log that i can check.

[thcp]

@raniaamina my bad, I totally got distracted. will look into that now.

[thcp]

@raniaamina

I found two possible problems and a disclaimer that I used AI with this comment since I'm really sleepy, but in the essence, 80% was made by me so here it goes:

The app was hanging, not just failing. The GPU check runs a real CUDA kernel launch to make sure the installed PyTorch actually works on your card. That call had no timeout, so when the driver and the wheel disagree it blocks forever inside the driver. Setup just stopped, which is exactly the "no progress, no logs" you saw.

Blackwell only ever got one wheel. The code handed every RTX 50-series card cu128 no matter what driver was present. Your 5070 Ti on a CUDA 13 driver was never offered anything else, so if that pairing didn't work there was nowhere to go. Related: a CUDA 13 driver was falling through to a cu124 wheel, two major versions behind.

So now the app tries cu130 (torch 2.11.0) first on a CUDA 13 driver, falls back to cu128 (torch 2.8.0) if that fails, and only drops to CPU after both fail. Every attempt gets written to setup.log with the tag and torch version.

If you're able to test from source again, the branch is fix/502-stuck-first-launch:

git fetch origin
git checkout fix/502-stuck-first-launch
bash scripts/linux/make-portable.sh

That needs uv, cargo, node, npm, tar and sha256sum on PATH, and produces a bundle under dist/.

To make sure it re-runs GPU detection from scratch rather than reusing an earlier result:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/stemdeck/logs/setup.log

Then whatever happens — working or not — could you send ~/.local/share/stemdeck/logs/setup.log? It'll now show which step it reached and which wheels it tried, something like:

[...] step: gpu-setup
[...] trying CUDA wheel cu130 (torch 2.11.0)
[...] cu130 verified

Two things I want to be upfront about. I don't have a Blackwell card or a Linux machine, so this is reasoned from the PyTorch index and your report rather than tested on the hardware — you're the only one who can confirm it. And if cu130 also fails to verify, the log will say so, and we'll at least know it's a torch version problem rather than guesswork.

The work is in #569 if you want to look.

Two notes for you, not for the comment: I mentioned ~/.local/share/stemdeck as the data dir — that's the XDG_DATA_HOME fallback, so it's right unless they've set that variable. And deleting setup.log isn't strictly needed, but a clean log makes their report far easier to read.

[raniaamina]

I tried twice, first run this bash scripts/linux/make-portable.sh and the second CPU_ONLY=0 ./scripts/linux/make-portable.sh

For first try, it run and open but only with CPU no GPU log at all.

The second, stuck and here is the log:
setup.log

I've waiting about 15 minutes with no result.

I tried to open again and watch the log; found this error

[1788515606] [stemdeck] CUDA verify failed. stderr:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/run/media/sherlock/zeroDrive/Labs/stemdeck-fix/dist/StemDeck-Linux-x64/python/lib/python3.12/site-packages/torch/__init__.py", line 416, in <module>
    from torch._C import *  # noqa: F403
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
ImportError: libcudnn.so.9: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory