Golly Help: Known Problems

This section lists all known bugs and limitations. If you come across any problems not mentioned below then please report them to Andrew Trevorrow (andrew@trevorrow.com) or Tom Rokicki (rokicki@gmail.com).

Problems on all platforms

• All editing operations are restricted to cells whose coordinates are within +/- 1 billion.

Windows problems

• Golly uses OpenGL to render patterns, but some graphics cards (especially from NVIDIA) seem to be quite buggy. If you see rendering problems then try these steps:
  1. Download and install the latest driver software for your card.
  2. If using Windows 10 then open Settings> System> Display> Graphics settings> Graphics performance and set Golly to "High performance".

Mac problems

• None.

Linux problems

• Scroll bars are not updated correctly while resizing the window.
• Golly has serious problems with Ubuntu's Unity interface. For example, selecting a modal dialog like Control> Set Rule can freeze Golly. There are also problems with overlay scrollbars. Most (all?) of the problems can be solved by disabling both the global menu bar and the overlay scrollbars. This can be done just for the golly binary by using the following alias:

  alias golly="UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 ./golly"

  For more details, see this forum post.