GNOME Shell crashes with SIGABRT when launching Zed editor (Mutter paint assertion failure, GNOME 50)

[arindamghosal07]

Describe the bug

GNOME Shell crashes entirely (SIGABRT / signal 6) when launching the Zed editor. The crash is a Mutter/Clutter assertion failure in the paint pipeline — clutter_actor_continue_paint → clutter_paint_node_paint → meta_window_actor_paint_to_content. Disabling Tiling Shell resolves the issue completely.

To Reproduce

1. Install Tiling Shell v17.3 on GNOME 50 / Mutter 50 (Wayland)
2. Install Zed editor (v1.9.0) — a GPU-accelerated, Vulkan-based code editor
3. Launch Zed from the app menu or terminal (zeditor)
4. GNOME Shell crashes immediately, user is logged out

Expected behavior
Zed opens normally without crashing the shell.

Stack trace (from coredump)

#0  pthread_kill (libc.so.6)
#1  raise (libc.so.6)
#2  abort (libc.so.6)
#3  g_assertion_message_expr (libglib-2.0.so.0)
#4  clutter_actor_continue_paint (libmutter-clutter-18.so.0)
#5  clutter_paint_node_paint (libmutter-clutter-18.so.0)
#6  clutter_actor_paint (libmutter-clutter-18.so.0)
#7  meta_window_actor_paint_to_content (libmutter-18.so.0)

Also present in journal before crash:

Attempting to call back into JSAPI during the sweeping phase of GC. This is most likely caused by not destroying a Clutter actor or Gtk+ widget with ::destroy signals connected...

Environment

• Tiling Shell version: 17.3
• GNOME version: 50.3 (Mutter 50.3-1.1)
• Desktop: GNOME on Wayland
• GPU: Intel Alder Lake (Mesa Intel Graphics, Mesa 26.1.4)
• Distro: CachyOS (Arch Linux, rolling)
• Zed version: 1.9.0

Additional context

• Issue Certain windows fail to render after starting tiling in a workspace, NixOS Gnome 50 on Wayland #579 reports a similar GNOME 50 rendering problem (windows failing to render), but this is more severe — it kills the entire GNOME Shell session.
• v17.3 does not list GNOME 50 in its metadata.json shell-version (same as Certain windows fail to render after starting tiling in a workspace, NixOS Gnome 50 on Wayland #579). v18.0 RC ([Release Candidate] Tiling Shell v18.0 | GNOME 50 support, right mouse button as activation key, keybinding to untile all the windows, bug fixes and more #582) adds GNOME 50 support — this crash may already be fixed there.
• Zed uses Vulkan for GPU-accelerated rendering, which likely triggers a different paint path than regular GTK apps.
• Workaround: disabling Tiling Shell, or launching Zed with GDK_BACKEND=x11.
• The libmutter-clutter-18.so.0 shows as (deleted) in coredump metadata (library was replaced during a system update while the process was running).