[bug]: Prebuilt version 25.4.0 doesn't run on Ubuntu 22.04

[dschnabel]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched existing issues and this bug hasn't been reported yet

Current behavior

I tried to upgrade from 25.2.0 to 25.4.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 using the provided .deb file:

$ sudo dpkg -i 'Hoppscotch_linux_x64.deb' 
(Reading database ... 229895 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack Hoppscotch_linux_x64.deb ...
Unpacking hoppscotch (25.4.0) over (25.2.0) ...
Setting up hoppscotch (25.4.0) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.17-2) ...
Processing triggers for mailcap (3.70+nmu1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1ubuntu3) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.26-1ubuntu3) ...

If I attempt to run the new version, I get a libc error:

$ hoppscotch-desktop 
hoppscotch-desktop: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.38' not found (required by hoppscotch-desktop)
hoppscotch-desktop: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.39' not found (required by hoppscotch-desktop)

Can you rebuild the .deb package on the oldest distro you are willing to support? Libc has backward compatibility, meaning you can run binaries built with an old libc on distros with a newer libc. But the other way around is not possible. Thank you.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Hoppscotch_linux_x64.deb on Ubuntu 22.04
2. Attempt to run it

Logs and Screenshots

Environment

Release

Hoppscotch Version

Local

Interceptor

Not Applicable - Issue not related to network requests

Browsers Affected

No response

Operating System

Linux

Additional Information

No response

[CuriousCorrelation]

Hi @dschnabel, thanks for the detailed bug report.

I've transferred this issue to the releases repository where we track pre-built release and dependency-related problems.

Your suggestion is great - and you can find our current build workflow at build-hoppscotch-desktop.yml if you'd like to examine it.

I'll definitely look into this, in the meantime if you have specific suggestions for improvements, I'd love to hear those either as comments here or as a direct PR to the workflow file, whichever is preferable.

We'll prioritize addressing this compatibility issue with one of the upcoming patch releases.

[CuriousCorrelation]

Hi there, just cross-posting my findings from a related issue hoppscotch/hoppscotch#3543 for visibility in this repo as well. We'll be using this issue as the tracking ticket for the cloud-desktop version of the app:

Just wanted to share some context about the GLIBC dependency + the challenges I’m experiencing with the build process.

Let me first start with a bit of history around this – previously, when the app was built with Tauri v1, we had resolved similar compatibility issues to an extent, however, these seems to have resurfaced in a new form after our migration to Tauri v2, which now requires libwebkit2gtk-4.1.

Why that matters is because libwebkit2gtk-4.1 is only available (by default) in Ubuntu 22.04+ and its derivatives. And while the previous version (4.0) was widely available across many Linux distros, this newer version of Tauri (v2) has not only resolved many bugs that had plagued the older version, it also brings a ton of capabilities and other improvements that has helped us ship a lot of features including the ability to connect to self-hosted instances (+ a bunch more).

Unfortunately that same library also introduced stricter GLIBC requirements, also documented in this Tauri issue. Btw libwebkit2gtk-4.1 isn’t ideal either because even though this is just a "minor version" bump from 4.0 to 4.1, the underlying dependencies are worlds apart in terms of compatibility (gtk4 upgrade). The maintainers of Tauri wanted to have support for both, but unfortunately that didn't happen due to a plethora of reasons, see tauri-apps/tauri#9039 (comment).

There’s another interesting discovery that the latest version of libwebkit2gtk-4.1 from both Ubuntu 24.04 and other older version repositories were broken for Wayland users, while the older versions in Ubuntu 22.04 repos (date back years) wasn't quite stable, didn't quite support many of the features our ui dependencies requires. It also caused some strange errors when launching the image including symbol lookup error: /tmp/.mount_APPNAME_0/usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol

Through some extensive testing and a ton of bisecting on the dependency tree, I figured out that WebKit2GTK 4.1 version 2.44.0-2 provides the best balance between compatibility and features, particularly for Wayland display support (as I’ve noted in issue #4880). I specifically needed to pin these exact versions:

libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0=2.44.0-2
libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev=2.44.0-2
libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-0=2.44.0-2
libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-dev=2.44.0-2
gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-4.1=2.44.0-2
gir1.2-webkit2-4.1=2.44.0-2

These were necessary to avoid the infamous Could not create default EGL display: EGL_BAD_PARAMETER. Aborting... error that occurs with other versions, as documented in WebKit bugs #180739 and #165246.

This also appears to be a long-standing issue where WebKit's compositing mode doesn't work properly with certain graphics drivers, not just on Wayland but also on x11, and in some cases one would need to set environment variables like WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 and WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 to launch the app properly.

Unfortunately, even the "best compromise" version requires newer GLIBC symbols than what's available in some older distributions. The latest findings show that the specific WebKit package we need to use inevitably pulls in dependencies requiring GLIBC 2.38+.

For our current releases, we build on Ubuntu 24.04 with specific WebKit version pinning and have implemented Wayland display fixes. I do understand the frustration for users on older distributions, since I’m also one of them, so looking ahead, I am exploring a few approaches, including investigating Flatpak as a more reliable cross-distribution method.

If anyone has any specific suggestions for improving the build process, please let me know. You can find our current workflow configuration at build-hoppscotch-desktop.yml if you'd like to take a look!

[jdndm]

Have you tried building on 22.4 to see if it works? As it stands, not supporting stable LTS distros like Ubuntu 22.4 alienating your potential userbase.

Can you perhaps run 2 builds on both 22.04 and 24.4 so those who are on stable LTS distros can also upgrade versions?