[Bug]: crash loop in sunshine due to system tray icon

[laanwj]

Describe the Bug

After an upgrade, the container stopped working for me. A crash loop was happening, with Xorg crashing, causing desktop to re-run, accumulating processes for gvfsd, dconf-service and so on until the system's file descriptors run out.

i eventually narrowed this down to sunshine's tray icon creation.

Workaround: in /home/default/.config/sunshine/sunshine.conf,

system_tray=disabled

As i see it, there's two bugs here:

• sunshine not being able to create the tray icon, taking down the X server with it
• X server crashes not being handled cleanly, resulting in accumulation of processes

Steps to Reproduce

Create and start the container (with sunshine enabled).

Expected Behavior

Moonlight can connect. X session running table. These processes only running once, not hundreds of times:

default      ... 0.0  0.0   8492  2972 ?        Ss   09:42   0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog --fork --print-pid 4 --pr
default      ...  0.0  0.0 312636  8144 ?        Sl   09:42   0:00 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
default     ...  0.0  0.0 165224  6176 ?        Sl   09:42   0:00 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
default     ...  0.0  0.0 390824 10844 ?        Sl   09:42   0:00 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor

Screenshots

N/A. No screen output at all.

Relevant Settings

• /home/default/.config/sunshine/sunshine.conf: system_tray, defaulting to enabled. The work-around is to set this to disabled.

Version

Build: [2026-05-09 03:45:03] [master] [096fc4b] [debian]

Platform

• Distribution: Ubuntu - 24.04.4 LTS (Noble Numbat)
• Linux Kernel: 6.8.0-111-generic x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• GPU Driver versions: NVIDIA-SMI 595.58.03 Driver Version: 595.58.03 CUDA Version: 13.2
• Docker: Docker version 29.5.0, build 98f1464
• Docker-compose: docker-compose version 1.29.2, build unknown

Relevant log output

stderr output from `sunshine`:

sunshine:74757): dbind-WARNING **: 09:08:31.388: AT-SPI: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.a11y.Bus was not provided by any .service files

(sunshine:74757): libayatana-appindicator-WARNING **: 09:08:31.388: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code.
Gtk-Message: 09:08:31.406: Failed to load module "colorreload-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 09:08:31.406: Failed to load module "window-decorations-gtk-module"

(sunshine:74757): libayatana-appindicator-WARNING **: 09:08:31.409: Unable to get the session bus: Cannot spawn a message bus when AT_SECURE is set

(sunshine:74757): LIBDBUSMENU-GLIB-WARNING **: 09:08:31.409: Unable to get session bus: Cannot spawn a message bus when AT_SECURE is set

(sunshine:74757): Gdk-CRITICAL **: 09:08:32.726: gdk_window_thaw_toplevel_updates: assertion 'window->update_and_descendants_freeze_count > 0' failed

xorg as well as desktop have no relevant error output from what i've seen.

The error about AT_SECURE may be relevant to the problem.

[tlperini]

Same happened here. Using docker.io/josh5/steam-headless:latest
Thanks for reporting, the workaround worked for me.

[AndMetal]

I've been losing my mind trying to figure out why I've been stuck in a crash loop like you described. I didn't have this setting in my sunshine.conf, so I added it and restarted, and right away it started working again. I've been digging through the logs and couldn't locate anything that would have pointed me anywhere near that, so thank you for sharing this workaround.