Data layers don't show up when running Qt with --disable-gpu

[astrofrog]

I'm not 100% sure if we want to support this but to get WWT to work correctly in glue under Big Sur I had to pass --disable-gpu to QtWebEngine. As an example, using the following and putting it in a file called test.py:

from pywwt.qt import WWTQtClient
wwt = WWTQtClient(block_until_ready=True)

from astropy.table import Table
OEC = 'https://worldwidetelescope.github.io/pywwt/data/open_exoplanet_catalogue.csv'
table = Table.read(OEC, delimiter=',', format='ascii.basic')

layer = wwt.layers.add_table_layer(table=table, frame='Sky',
                           lon_att='ra', lat_att='dec', size_scale=100, lon_unit='degree')

print(layer.lon_unit)

wwt.wait()

I ran:

QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--disable-gpu"  python test.py

WWT then runs slowly (as expected) but the points don't show up at all. I normally wouldn't really care about this but I've seen this behavior in other contexts before so I wonder if this is just highlighting a real issue that needs fixing.

[astrofrog]

Ah here we go, I think it must be related to WorldWideTelescope/wwt-webgl-engine#32 - it's just a more deterministic way of reproducing that issue.

[pkgw]

Weird. This feels like something that, like you imply, may not be worth the effort to fix, but I would definitely like to understand what's going on here. Please update with anything that you figure out!