General Linux weirdness in Google Sheets

[Potatoes2241]

Hey all,

 

Looking at the plans for future Windows development and how MS doubles down on making the experience of an average user absolutely miserable, I've decided it's high time to start preparing for the big move. Dualbooting with Mint now, going through my use cases one by one to see how Mint fares in comparison with Windows before pulling the plug. So far so good - I'm impressed with how much has changed in the past years since I last tried other distros especially in regards to game support. Not too surprised to see new games run pretty much flawlessly but was impressed to see it run older mid-00s windows games with some minor tweaking.

 

However, apart from obligatory tinkering here in there, I ran into some unexpected weird bugs I can't even find in Google or whatever. One of them is the strange behavior of Google Sheets.

 

Some context: I'm 3D printing almost 24/7 and have a Sheet where I track how many parts I've printed in this run and how much filament I've left. The sheet needs to be on the web cuz I may need to make changes to it while away from my PC.

 

Now, specifically when I edit the sheet while in Mint, the cells I've updated start changing their values erratically. To be specific, the values change from the old one to the new one, and then back to the old one, every few clicks on any other cell inside the sheet. For whatever reason, the glitch disappears if I zoom in the page - learned this when capturing the video for reference. I do not experience this bs while editing this Sheet from Windows or iOS. I wasted about an hour of my life manually re-counting the parts a few times and thought I'm going insane when the numbers lined up perfectly one moment and then a few minutes later I look at the calculations and realize they are wrong again.

 

Honestly I just wanted to share this insanity with you and have not performed the usual troubleshooting stuff yet, but curious if you experienced something like that as well. Any insight will be appreciated, still new to this.

[Biohazard777]

Have you tried with a different browser?

[Potatoes2241]

1 hour ago, Biohazard777 said:

Have you tried with a different browser?

Chromium seems to work fine for now but I'll re-check later. Seems like this glitch is getting triggered by something, once you restart the browser/open in a new tab it seems to work properly for some time.

 

Also tried to clear the website data and launch the Sheet in a private window - still getting borked.

Dunno why I failed to mention it from the beginning but I'm on Firefox 130

[Biohazard777]

15 minutes ago, Potatoes2241 said:

Chromium seems to work fine for now but I'll re-check later. Seems like this glitch is getting triggered by something, once you restart the browser/open in a new tab it seems to work properly for some time.

 

Also tried to clear the website data and launch the Sheet in a private window - still getting borked.

Dunno why I failed to mention it from the beginning but I'm on Firefox 130

The issues you were describing are typically not OS specific, but browser engine or extension related.
And yeah I figured it was FF, it is the default on Mint (and many other distros).
Firefox has always had issues with Google products...

Usually, Google is the one to blame, but sometimes it is Mozilla's fault.

[Potatoes2241]

2 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

The issues you were describing are typically not OS specific, but browser engine or extension related.
And yeah I figured it was FF, it is the default on Mint (and many other distros).
Firefox has always had issues with Google products...

Usually, Google is the one to blame, but sometimes it is Mozilla's fault.

What bothers me is that I also use FF on Windows and it behaves normally with this same sheet

As for extensions, I assumed that uBlock and Dark Reader may brake stuff but disabling them (and even running through Private window with no extensions) still goes the same.

 

Edit: Seems like the glitch won't appear when launching FF in troubleshoot mode. However, I did try disabling hardware acceleration and all the addons in regular mode to no effect. According to Mozilla troubleshoot mode disables these things:

• Add-ons (extensions and themes)
• Hardware acceleration and WebGL
• Window and sidebar size and position settings
• userChrome and userContent customizations
• JavaScript Just-in-time (JIT) compiler

So apparently something less obvious might be broken here, I'll continue troubleshooting later.

Edited September 7 by Potatoes2241

[Potatoes2241]

Alright, an update but not a welcome one

 

Since the day of posting I installed a different distro and moved from Cinnamon Mint to Kubuntu. For whatever reason, the situation here is even worse - with Mint the bug took some time to get triggered, but on Kubuntu it gets borked right away every time you make any change to the sheet. The changes themself are being saved on the server side, but the displayed info jumps between the old and new data each time you click on the sheet. And yeah, WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT, Chromium seems to be just fine.

 

For reference info, running Kubuntu 24.04, Plasma 5.27.11, 550 Nvidia drivers and flatpak version of Firefox. At this point I just want to share this case cus it does not seem to be too common, maybe someone will find it useful

 

On the plus side, I really dig the experience and for the first time in many years of considerations I'm actually thinking about finally making the switch from Windows. Sure it's  still not in "it just works" category but neither is windows nowadays, and the amount of crap I need to perform to get something running like I want it to is pretty much comparable. So far only two things are missing for me - an easy to handle fan configuration software and a neat music player with decent tag management tools and device syncing. And damn google sheets.