I remember old good times when I would use Inkscape for hours, every day. I used to think it is the best SVG editing program ever and told everybody about it. But for the last several years user experience has been deteriorating constantly, and eventually I had to stop using Inkscape at all. The reason is simple: frustrating crashes. Ones that you cannot even predict.

It's been crashing on all versions of Ubuntu I used for the past years, and it's crashing now on Ubuntu 18.04.

Today I launched it again, hoping as always that maybe it's finally been fixed. But no: for 5 mintues it's crashed 3 times completely nullifying my work. Huh.

I tried to find a way to install some old stable version of Inkscape (e.g. 0.48), but since binaries are not provided and I don't have enough time to start building it from source - I just gave up.

That's said, if there's a chance it can be revived, I will do my best to help nailing down crash issues I experience.

Let me add that my desktop manager is KDE (Maybe Inkscape is not compatible with it particularly or being tested in GTK environments only or IDK).

How can I provide needed information to investigate possbile reasons of crashes? You see, I cannot tell WHEN or WHY it's crashing. It happens randomly.

Hi onkeltem,

Thanks for offering to help track down the bug/s causing Inkscape to crash on your system.

- - -

Running Inkscape from an terminal emulator may help. Launch the terminal emulator and type in all lowercase: inkscape

This will launch Inkscape, don't close the terminal emulator - as this will also kill Inkscape.

Use Inkscape until it crashes. Hopefully an error message will have been output in the terminal emulator. Copy the error message and post it here.

https://vitux.com/how-to-set-the-gnome-default-terminal-emulator-on-ubuntu/

- - -
From versions 0.91 there have been AppImages available for Inkscape. This is like a self contained application format and therefore old versions can be run. However, I can't see any available for 0.48.

Jon

The program 'inkscape' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'XI_BadDevice (invalid Device parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 32516 error_code 129 request_code 131 minor_code 13)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

This is the output I get after inkscape crashes. Following is the message I get with --sync switch :

The program 'inkscape' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'XI_BadDevice (invalid Device parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 209381 error_code 129 request_code 131 minor_code 13)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

My system specifications are

System:
  Host: p7-OptiPlex-390 Kernel: 5.3.0-46-generic x86_64 bits: 64 
  compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0 Desktop: Xfce 4.14.1 tk: Gtk 3.22.30 
  info: xfce4-panel wm: xfwm4 dm: LightDM 1.26.0 
  Distro: Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia base: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic 

Thanks for feedback. How often does this error occur and is it when you perform a particular actions?