Pure Maps running slow

[robert2]

I’m running the Pure Maps and OSM Scout Server flatpaks on my Librem5 in PureOS 10. I used it successfully for offline navigation as recently as September 14th, 2025. However, when I next tried to use it the following week on September 21st, the Pure Maps GUI was extremely slow. Zooming in and out was almost completely unresponsive. My GPS location did update, but any interaction had a lag of 5 to 10 seconds. A test of routing for a short trip a few miles long took over 5 minutes.

Has anyone else noticed a change in Pure Maps recently?

Could it be caused by a flatpak update? I forgot if I ran a flatpak update between the 14th and the 21st. If someone can advise me how to check my flatpak history, I would appreciate it.

Also, when I run flatpak update, I get the following message:

$ flatpak update
Looking for updates…
Info: org.kde.Platform//5.15-23.08 is end-of-life, with reason:
We strongly recommend moving to the latest stable version of the Platform and SDK
Applications using this runtime:
io.github.rinigus.OSMScoutServer

I’m not sure if this is relevant to the problem I’m having.

[Sarcasmo220]

I have noticed the same thing. The last couple of weeks it has been very slow.

[robert2]

I was just looking up how to downgrade flatpaks to see if that resolves the Pure Maps issue. I was checking the previous versions of PureMaps, and I got this output:

It seems there hasn’t been a new version since May 16th. Am I interpreting this output correctly?

Also, this is the output for OSM Scout Server:

It seems there hasn’t been a new version since Feb. 2024.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might have changed in the past few weeks?

[dos]

Looks like something changed in the runtime that broke the GPU acceleration. It fallbacks to llvmpipe, which makes everything slow.

Running it via X11 (QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb) makes the acceleration work at the cost of blurry UI.

@robert2

I’m not sure if this is relevant to the problem I’m having.

No.

[robert2]

@dos

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb

Thank you. That is a very helpful insight. I tried running it from the terminal using the environment variable you recommended:

$ QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb
$ flatpak run io.github.rinigus.PureMaps

As you expected, that indeed resolved the speed issue at the expense of somewhat blurry pixels.

This is what I got when I ran Pure Maps from the command line without the environment variable:

Does anything here suggest what may have broken GPU acceleration?

[robert2]

Also, might this GPU acceleration issue be related to the UI problem I’m having with the latest 7.72.0 flatpak version of signal (link below)?

Graphics problems in Signal Flatpak on Librem5

I just upgraded my signal flatpak on my Librem 5 from 7.71.0 to 7.72.1 and the graphics look horrible. The icon images on the left panel are corrupted, and all the text is blurry. I tried manually downgrading to 7.71.0 by downloading the signal_arm64.flatpak file from Releases · signalflatpak/signal · GitHub, but when I tried running it I got an error message saying my database is incompatible with the older signal version. Any suggestions on how to resolve the graphics problems?

[robert2]

As a workaround for now, I’d like to set the QT_QPA_PLATFORM environment variable in the io.github.rinigus.PureMaps.desktop file. I’ve tried some methods for setting environment variables in the Exec line, but they don’t seem to work.

Do you know (or does anyone else reading know) the proper way to set an environment variable for a flatpak executable in the .desktop file?

[dos]

Instead of fiddling with desktop files, it’d probably be best to set up an override with flatpak override --env=QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb io.github.rinigus.PureMaps instead.

[robert2]

Thanks, that did what I wanted.

However, it seems I can’t run two X11 applications simultaneously, as they appear to conflict. Signal Desktop now seems to be running via X11 since the last update, and the touch commands in Signal (like scrolling) go instead to PureMaps when both are open at the same time.