Shadows being drawn over UI on Wayland display in Crostini Linux environment
In the Crostini Linux environment (the subsystem on ChromeOS), it appears that drop-shadow window decorations are being drawn above the rest of the app's UI. This happens on IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, and I've found a record of it happening in the past (on WSL and directly on Linux, especially when Wayland is involved). There are known workarounds using JVM flags, but the config folder where those must be placed is only created after first run. I'm creating a script to automatically install these IDEs so that students don't have to understand how to download, check hashes, untar and install files on a Linux system in order to use our programming environments. I can't have my script put a file into a directory that doesn't currently exist, so automating the work-around doesn't immediately work. Is there any known way to avoid this issue entirely or reliably solve the folder-creating issue? I have also submitted a bug report to see if this can get resolved upstream, but I wanted to see if you all had any ideas that would fix it in the short term.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Hello,
You can use one of the following solutions for this scenario.
The first solution: Pre-create the per-user config directory from your script.
Example for a bash script:
The IDE merges this file with its bundled vmoptions (that located in the
<installation_path>/bin/idea64.vmoptions) on startup, so a single line is enough. Adjust the directory name per product and version (PyCharm2026.1,IntelliJIdea2026.1.1, etc.).The second solution: Point the IDE at a custom vmoptions file via environment variable.
Set
IDEA_VM_OPTIONS=/path/to/your/idea64.vmoptions(orPYCHARM_VM_OPTIONS=…) in the user's shell profile or in the wrapper script you use to launch the IDE. The IDE reads that file in addition to the bundled one. This is handy if you want one shared vmoptions file across multiple managed accounts.This issue should be fixed as part of JBR-10006 in 2026.2, and we are working on backporting it into 2026.1.*
Please let me know if you have any questions or difficulties.