Fix: Spotify UI lags/unresponsive between track changes on Linux

Cody Reichert
Sep 3, 2018 · 1 min read

The only other similarly sounding report I could find was in a Spotify Community thread, but there were a few others that were probably the same issue.

ISSUE

When the track changes in Spotify on Linux, the Spotify app’s UI would become completely unresponsive for about 30 seconds (most noticeably the scrubber/progress bar). You can’t navigate any pages, change the track, or use any of the controls. Then everything would pick back up normally.

I’m on Arch Linux. For me the issue was intermittent and of course the solution was extremely simple.

SOLUTION

The Spotify client can not send notifications to the desktop— the timeout for that is ~30 seconds. Turning on the notification service fixes the issue (`notify-send` or whatever you use), or disabling notifications in the Spotify client will also work.

Cody Reichert

Written by

I build assertible.com, simplyrets.com, identibyte.com, and other stuff! Into good code, interaction design, and books :D

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