Known System Related Issues

KiCad is configured to automatically detect the proper scaling factor for displaying the editor canvas on the screen by default. If the canvas only uses 1/4 of the screen and there is a constant offset between the cursor and crosshairs, check to ensure that automatic canvas scaling is enabled on the common settings page of the Preferences dialog.

There are some known issues that can cause the canvas to not automatically scale properly, primarily on Linux installations (see Launchpad Bug #1841423 and GitLab Bug #54). To fix this, disable the automatic canvas scaling in the preferences window and enter a custom scale factor. In most cases a scaling factor of 2 seems to fix the issue.

Toolbar icons may also appear smaller on high DPI screens, but their size can be scaled in the preferences window as well.

Menu items may have inconsistent vertical sizing, causing the bottom part of the text to be cutoff. Disabling "Show icons in menus" in the Preferences dialog will make all menu items a uniform height and fix the cutoff text (see GitLab Bug #3785).

The grid dots may be difficult to see due to their smaller size on these displays. On the modern canvas, their size can be increased in the preferences window (see GitLab Bug #444).

Some users with Radeon graphics have been experiencing problems with slow rendering in gerbview and Eeschema. Some bugs have been opened related to Radeon cards. The solution seems to be require changing an Xorg setting which is either Option "EXAPixmaps" "off" or Option "ShadowPrimary" (see the bug reports for details).

It is known that KiCad does not work well under Wayland. There are a number of known issues with wxWidgets and Wayland. See the wxWidgets bug tracker for details.

KiCad requests the XWayland compatibility layer when starting, however this is an emulation mode and issues arising while using this mode need to be recreated under X11 before they will be addressed.

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.

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.