Tkinter crashes computer after MacOS 10.14.6 update

Question

After updating my 2019 Macbook Pro yesterday to MacOS Mojave 10.14.6, a tkinter application that I have packaged with pyinstaller now crashes my computer. The screen turns black for a second, and then restarts to the login screen. When I run the program through the command line (unpackaged), it runs just fine.

The error code that appears several times in terminal is: CGSTrackingRegionSetIsEnabled returned CG error 268435459.

The research I've done has led me to these links:

1. This unanswered StackOverflow question
2. This semi-related SuperUser question
3. This question on the Japanese Q&A site teratail

The unanswered StackOverflow question is slightly different than my own problem, as it seems that that user cannot create a Tk() window at all, whereas I can create a Tk() window (including the Python IDLE), but it breaks when I package it with pyinstaller.

The SuperUser question is unanswered, but as one of the answers suggest I have uninstalled and reinstalled pyinstaller to no avail.

The question on teratail was answered, and says that the problem was fixed by uninstalling "Anaconda", but I don't know what Anaconda is or how to uninstall it.

I suspect that this is a problem with the MacOS update, and that there is nothing I can do to fix it and I'll have to wait for a patch.

Why is this happening? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

This problem has troubled me for a long time. My macOS version is 10.14.6 (Mojave). Running tkinter will crash the system, but I don’t want to update macOS version to 10.15 (Catalina) for this problem.

I got a solution by updating the python version.

My own test results, python versions 3.8.2 and 3.8.3 can fix the problem, but python versions 3.8.1, 3.7.x, 3.6.x will cause the crash.

Answer 2

I can confirm that this happens with Python 3.7.x. Moving to 3.8.3 fixes the problem.

Answer 3

Workaround: boot in Safe Mode.. (Other apps are experiencing this.)

The macOS Window Server is crashing.. The Console.app contains the crash report in the "System Reports" node.

Process: WindowServer Thread 0 (main thread) crashes in CGXBeginSurfaceLayerUpdate