Feat: Raspberry pi os works, but can't directly open the window without clicking on system tray

[stonneau]

Hello, first of all thank you for your fantastic project.
I am trying to build a raspberry pi 3B+ device for my daughter to listen to music and podcasts without using a phone. The flatpak version - 7.1.20 - of the current build worked directly, and after some parameter tuning it is working pretty smoothly with a touch display 2. So thank you for that!

My issue is that I would like the app to open in full screen mode at startup, but no matter what options I give this seems to fail (including the various tray option and env vars tuning). The window does not display, and I need to click on the system tray icon to have the deezer application open, then use the f11 key to put it fullscreen. Obviously the final product won't have the keyboard.

The option that seems to prevent opening the app is --disable-gpu when running the software. However, if I don't run it the application is too slow...

I know that raspberry pi OS is probably a 0 priority, but I am wondering whether you have any advice on what could be the reason for my struggle?

Thank you so much for the project and help.

[josselinonduty]

Bonjour @stonneau,
Thanks for the love 😎

Actually, I have tried to run it on my own raspberry pi 3B (maybe +) a few years ago, so it is not out of scope I guess.

I will try again and update you in the near future.
In the meantime, you may try to use --disable-animations in addition to --disable-gpu. Animations are known to slow down the app and use a lot of unecessary processing power.

[stonneau]

Thanks for the answer ! I found an ugly workaround for now:
I start the application once, sleep enough time for it be opened in the task bar (although it won't display full screen), and then I start it again, and it works...
This is not the best, but it works for now.
Would love to hear about an update of course!

Thanks again for the hard work! I'll try disabling the animations too, it is indeed quite slow still ...

[josselinonduty]

I was able to install and run deezer-linux on my raspberry pi 3B+, using raspberry pi os (freshly flashed 64bits, december 2025) and flatpak v7.1.50.

Authentication process was awfully slow but it worked. The app launched on first click, I didn't need to open it twice to get it to show like you said. I was able to make it start fullscreen using --start-fullscreen. It is quite slow indeed (as is my whole system). --disable-animations made it slightly less slow in my opinion, but it is hardly noticeable.

Since Deezer is based on Electron, which is basically a whole web browser, it can't be really fast on embedded systems like rpi unless you implement more radical changes

edit
take a look at this to launch at startup https://gist.github.com/rampfox/085bf3ffb9ff51e114bf7afdf3ced71b

[stonneau]

Thanks a lot, I ll try this. To be clear, I can start it at startup without the --disable-gpu flag.
With the flag on, it only brings the app on the launch tray. I did a different startup config, so I ll try the one indicated in the link to see. the full screen does not work at startup either.

All of this works if launched from bash AFTER start up. It seems that this is what you did?
My issues appear if I try to automate this.

I have a bunch of flags that I use, most of them are probably useless, but in my case it does run at an acceptable rate after the slow launch. I ll add the disable-animations

I did not have time to properly document my attempts, I just dropped some notes on a git repo.

My command is

DZ_START_IN_TRAY=no flatpak
--env=DZ_START_IN_TRAY=no
run dev.aunetx.deezer
--disable-systray
--disable-gpu
--force-device-scale-factor=1.7

the scaling is convenient for a 5 inch screen.

To emulate a full screen mode I removed the borders of the window, see notes here:
https://github.com/stonneau/deezerpi/tree/main

This is not a proper tutorial yet, I ll put that in form when I have a minute.

Thanks a lot I ll try to look into what you suggest when I get a break from work

[josselinonduty]

Oh, I see now. Yeah you are right, I did not try to automate it at startup.
I'll try