Bug 258662

Summary:	Plasma panel is unresponsive and shows flashing box when resized to edge of screen
Product:	[Unmaintained] plasma4	Reporter:	Jeremy Sanders <jeremy>
Component:	multiscreen	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	normal	CC:	aseigo, notmart, rmj, thijs22nospam
Priority:	NOR
Version:	4.5 and older
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Fedora RPMs
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	plasma-desktop-appletsrc file that shows the problem Similar plasma-desktop-appletsrc that works fine

Description Jeremy Sanders 2010-12-03 11:21:57 UTC

Version:           unspecified (using KDE 4.5.3) 
OS:                Linux

I have a two monitor setup with nvidia twinview. Desktop effects are switched on. I'm using Fedora 14 binaries on x86-64 Linux.

If I resize the panel (at the bottom of my left screen) so that it fills the width of the left screen, I see a small grey box with irregularly flashes to the right of the panel. The panel, and plasma as a whole including the desktop, becomes unresponsive and needs to be killed. I have to leave the panel to partially fill the left screen to prevent this problem. If plasma decides itself to resize the panel I see the problem again.

This worked fine in Fedora 12 under KDE 4.4.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Resize panel to fill width of screen

Comment 1 Marco Martin 2010-12-03 17:32:15 UTC

resized in height or in width?

Comment 2 Marco Martin 2010-12-03 17:32:30 UTC

also, composite is active?

Comment 3 Jeremy Sanders 2010-12-03 17:38:19 UTC

If that's desktop effects, here are the settings in kwinrc:

[Compositing]
AnimationSpeed=2
Backend=OpenGL
CheckIsSafe=true
DisableChecks=false
Enabled=true
GLDirect=true
GLMode=TFP
GLTextureFilter=1
GLVSync=true
HiddenPreviews=5
OpenGLIsUnsafe=false
XRenderSmoothScale=false

Comment 4 Roderick Johnstone 2010-12-08 18:13:42 UTC

Created attachment 54306 [details]
plasma-desktop-appletsrc file that shows the problem

Comment 5 Roderick Johnstone 2010-12-08 18:14:50 UTC

I'm seeing this too in Jeremy's environment (different system, but configured the same). This is with an nvidia card and using nvidia drivers.

Ways to prevent the flashing unresponsive plasma-desktop include:
1) Turning off twinview
2) Turning off desktop effects

I'm attaching two similar plasma-desktop-appletsrc files. One that causes the flashing and one that doesn't.

Comment 6 Roderick Johnstone 2010-12-08 18:16:32 UTC

Created attachment 54307 [details]
Similar plasma-desktop-appletsrc that works fine

Similar plasma-desktop-appletsrc to that in comment #4, but this one works fine.

Comment 7 Aaron J. Seigo 2010-12-09 05:15:57 UTC

@Roderick: just for clarification on the "things that make it work again": if you leave twinview on but disable desktop effects the problem doesn't occur? and if you disable twinview but enable desktop effects it doesn't occur? or do you have to disable both? (i'm assuming it's the first two, but i just want to be completely sure :)

Comment 8 Roderick Johnstone 2010-12-09 10:17:44 UTC

@Aaron: Sorry not to be clearer, yes it is either 1) or 2) that will fix the problem. In my tests you need both twinview and desktop effects on to provoke the problem. Turning either off fixes it.

Comment 9 Roderick Johnstone 2010-12-30 11:11:51 UTC

A further data point...

I had a user with a single monitor display that had this problem a few days ago, so its not just a twinview issue. This was with an nvidia card and drivers from nvidia.

Comment 10 Thijs 2012-01-02 10:04:45 UTC

I seem to remember having a reasonable amount of issues with different screen sizes and panel reshaping in the 4.4/4.5 era too (albeit with Intel).... but things are a lot better now for me. Are these issues still an issue?

Comment 11 Myriam Schweingruber 2012-05-19 09:06:43 UTC

Is this still valid with KDE 4.8.3 or later?

Comment 12 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-09-04 19:07:05 UTC

Hello! Plasma 4 was replaced by Plasma 5 four years ago by the KDE community. In that time we have made great strides in stability and functionality. We are closing all Plasma 4 bugs as most of them are no longer applicable to the new frameworks Plasma 5 is built upon. If you could, please re-test with the latest version of Plasma 5, and submit a new bug to "plasmashell" if you continue to have an issue. Thank you!