Hello,
when I am working in KiCad I am experiencing a severe amount of crashes on mac os. I’ve had those crashes occasionally in V7 as well, and since I was not able to reproduce a clear cause I’ve never filed a bug report. But since V8 those crashes feel even more severe. Most of the time they occur when I open the properties window by pressing E. Sometimes it also happens when I’m refilling the fills by pressing B. Those are the most prominent cases, but it is absolutely not reproducible. I can inspect properties 20 times and nothing crashes, but that one time kicad is gone instantly and the crash report windows opens.
Overall I can only say that KiCad on Mac OS is the most crashing piece of software that I have used in a very long time. It crashes at least once per hour, sometimes 3 times, sometimes not at all. I wish I could give you a proper reproducible bug report, but I for the life of me cannot find a scenario where I know it’s going to crash, they always happen out of the blue.
Please please please, with all the great features that have been added in the past few years, please add some more focus on stability I have already reinstalled the habit of CMD+S-ing all the time, which no modern software requires anymore, but I still sometimes loose tedious pieces of work that I then have to redo.
I am currently on MacOS 15.0 (no change in crash frequency since 14.x) on a MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max with 32GB RAM.
If there’s anything I can do to help pin the problems please let me know.
All I can say is that I have a similar computer and do not experience crashing regularly in v8.0.5. Just to check, you are using a recent bug fix release of v8?
If you are noticing a specific crash that has continued across major versions, it is possible that you’ve found an edge case with your specific project/footprints that hasn’t been reported. You can make a bug report in KiCad with Help > Report a Bug. A page will open in your browser to a new Gitlab issue with some basic info about your system pasted into the issue template. Resolving this will likely require access to your project, though you can either make the issue confidential (so only the core developers can see it) or you can strip out most of the project down to one footprint that still causes a crash on opening the properties window.
I use KiCad on several macs pretty much daily and don’t see this kind of crash. If this were widespread across many users, in my experience we would be hearing about it a lot more (and experiencing it ourselves, for those of us who use macOS). We need more details as scandey says to investigate. In addition to the specific files you are using, please include the macOS crash report that gets generated when you experience a crash.
The KiCad developers do focus on stability (except for the Nightlies) and repeatable crash bugs get the highest priority on the issue tracker, becoming release blockers.
Some users have hardware and software combinations that crash in ways that nobody else get.
I have already reinstalled the habit of CMD+S-ing all the time, which no modern software requires anymore, but I still sometimes loose tedious pieces of work that I then have to redo.