Known System Related Issues

KiCad does run on Wayland systems, but with significant limitations and known issues that substantially degrade the user experience. Examples of issues that KiCad users have encountered on Wayland include:

These types of issues sometimes take significant time to investigate and understand, and only occasionally can be worked around with Wayland-specific patches in KiCad code. Maintaining these code paths (which are not required for Windows, macOS, or X11) not only takes extra development time, but also creates a maintenance burden that can lead to regressions in the future. More often, these issues exist either in the Wayland protocol itself or in another part of the software stack such as the window manager, compositor, or graphics driver. In these cases, there is nothing that can be changed in KiCad itself to resolve the issue.

In order to focus limited development resources on features and improvements that benefit all users, the KiCad team has made the decision to not investigate issues seen on Wayland systems that are not able to be reproduced on X11. For the moment, we recommend that users who need a stable and reliable platform for KiCad use X11 instead of Wayland.

Issues or bugs encountered while using Wayland or the XWayland compatibility layer must be reproduced under X11 before they will be addressed by KiCad. Bugs that cannot be reproduced on X11 should be reported to your distribution’s bug tracker, where they can be investigated to identify which software component is causing the issue.

For more details, please see our blog post on the topic.

Some versions of MATE (on Ubuntu or Linux Mint) together with GTK3 and wxWidgets can lead to rendering problems and keyboard keys that do not work or can freeze the GUI input. They are potentially caused by the ibus. To solve it, install the packages ibus-gtk and ibus-gtk3, and restart the computer (or log out).

Alternatively, you can quit the ibus calling in a terminal ibus exit before starting KiCad. More details can be found in GitLab Bug# 4547.

Users with Intel integrated GPUs running outdated drivers may experience graphical artifacts (usually horizontal green lines) covering the editing canvases. These artifacts are caused by bugs in the graphics driver. To solve this issue, update to the latest version of the Intel graphics driver for your system. Note that you may need to manually download and install an updated driver on some systems; Windows Update does not always have a driver version new enough to resolve this issue.

Editing projects located on Windows networks shares provided by samba servers (non-Windows Server, i.e. Synology, FreeNAS) may result in crashes due to samba generating bad file change events and our cross-platform toolkit asserting the invalid event rather than ignoring it. Windows Server hosted shares should not encounter this issue.

You will have to work on a local drive if you encounter crashes working from a network drive for now. More details can be found in GitLab Bug #5740.

Prior to and including Windows 10 build 1607, the maximum path length was limited to 260 characters. This would cause problems primarily when creating project back up archives when saving schematic and board files. As of KiCad version 8.0.8, a path length fix was introduced that resolves the issue when creating project back up archives. If you are still having issues saving other files due to path length issues, see the Microsoft help on how to enable long paths.

macOS has a setting labeled "Displays have separate Spaces" in the System Settings under Mission Control. If this setting is enabled, KiCad dialog windows may disappear if dragged to a different monitor, resulting in KiCad no longer responding (since an invisible dialog is still active) and needing to be force-quit. Users on macOS who use multiple monitors are advised to disable this setting.