White screen of death if WiFi is a incomplete click-through connection

UPDATE (2023-08-30): this issue has seemed to have gone away. Why? I am not sure.

Joplin 2.10.19, Linux (Fedora 37)

There is this cafe I go to. Its wifi is one of those where you have to plug in the password into a popup webpage (versus the system's wifi settings). And so, the computer has a legit wifi connection, but the web doesn't actually work.

The challenge I have is that the wifi at this particular cafe is sometimes very finicky and doesn't properly trigger that popup. I have gone a solid hour with that "half connection" before at that place.

Joplin's issue with it...

If I start up Joplin when my WiFi connection is in this state, Joplin just sits in the "White Screen of Death" indefinitely. And if you wait, it doesn't time out or anything like that. It just stays in that state.

It took me forever to figure out it was because Joplin just assumed the internet was working and that it just had to wait. Or some such.

The workaround is to either fix the WiFi connection or turn it off. But that is a workaround. Joplin should crank up, internet, half-internet, or no internet. :slight_smile:

I would attach a debug log on this, but ... I am writing this well after the fact. If I get back there, I will add that debug log to this.

It sorts of handle bad connections already, but in some cases the connection seems to get stuck and never times out. It's a problem with Electron or Node I assume as this is a low-level behaviour which we don't really control. I tried before to set a timeout but that gets ignored when the connection is really bad and it gets stuck anyway

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Interestingly, I went to a new cafe today. No open networks. Nothing. Booted my machine from shutdown and then tried to open Jopiln. ... White screen of death. So, this time, it wasn't a "half-conection". I tried closing Joplin ... It would not shut down! I rebooted. Tried again. Same thing.

Then I did this: I turned on a hotspot and connected to that. Joplin liked that and finished its opening process just fine. Then I closed Joplin and killed the WiFi connection. I opened Joplin without WiFi and this time ... it opened just fine.

Something really quirky going on.

Is it possible to add a spinner or something? You can't tell if Joplin is actually doing anything at that time. Sure, it is trying to connect to the WiFi, but ... is it? Did it time out and just lock up? Just really hard to tell what is going on.

When you get the white screen could you turn on the console to see what error you have?

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