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Troubleshooting — Desktop App

The tray icon does not appear

Section titled “The tray icon does not appear”

Linux, GNOME — install gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1. Without it the icon silently does not render, with no error anywhere. This is the most common report.

macOS — the app has no Dock icon by design; look in the menu bar. If it is not there, check it is running and see the log.

Either way lifeboat-core runs the whole control plane headless, so the tray is convenience rather than a requirement.

Is it running?

Section titled “Is it running?”

Open http://127.0.0.1:30800 — note this is not the container’s 8001. If the console loads, the service is up whatever the tray shows.

macOS says the app cannot be opened

Section titled “macOS says the app cannot be opened”

It should not: both builds are signed with an Apple Developer ID, notarized and stapled, so they open with a double-click and work offline.

If you see a security prompt, the download is likely incomplete or corrupted. Re-download and check the SHA-256 against SHA256SUMS. Do not work around it by disabling Gatekeeper — a build that Gatekeeper refuses did not come from us.

A model cannot be downloaded

Section titled “A model cannot be downloaded”

The catalogue is filtered to formats this machine can serve, and a safetensors-only repository is refused before the download starts. On a Mac choose MLX or GGUF.

This is not a limitation of the download — it is that the tensor engine does not run on macOS, so those weights could not be loaded. See Model formats.

It is slower than expected

Section titled “It is slower than expected”

Decode is memory-bandwidth bound. On an 8 GB machine a 1.5B–4B model at 4-bit is comfortable, 8B is the ceiling, 14B will not fit. Expect time-to-first-token to dominate on a low-core machine.

On Apple Silicon prefer MLX — it is the fast path there, and it is what the recommended list offers first.

The desktop build has no tensor engine, so the GPU optimization layer and speculative decoding do not apply. See Deployment on desktop.

Updating

Section titled “Updating”

Check for Updates… in the tray compares against the published releases. Updating is a download and reinstall; the data directory is untouched, so the registry, servers and licence carry across.

Where are the logs?

Section titled “Where are the logs?”

Show Log in the tray. The files live under the application-support directory alongside the registry and per-server logs.

I cannot sign in

Section titled “I cannot sign in”

No default credential ships. If no account exists, quitting and restarting re-runs first-run setup. If an account exists and the password is lost, the data directory holds the store — recovering means resetting it, which loses the registry.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”