Q:

Why does the Spotify client render certain pages completely black?

Spotify starts up fine, but when navigating to certain sections of the app, instead of the expected content a black square is displayed. What is causing this issue and how can it be resolved?

A:

A while back, Spotify enabled hardware acceleration by default in the desktop client. On certain systems (not only Linux), incompatibility with the graphics drivers causes some content to fail to render. The suggested solution is to disable hardware acceleration in the clients' Preferences (Edit > Preferences):

Applying this change requires a restart of the Spotify client. If this causes a "Failed loading skin" error, uninstall spotify (sudo apt-get remove spotify-client) and remove /opt/Spotify (sudo rm -rfv /opt/Spotify). Reinstall Spotify (sudo apt-get install spotify-client) and the issue should be resolved; hardware acceleration should now be disabled.

