Bug 354097

Summary:	Session management broken when using several virtual desktops
Product:	[Unmaintained] ksmserver	Reporter:	Frank <fhenry>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Lubos Lunak <l.lunak>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	grave	CC:	kdebugs.anon134, tuomas.karna, wbauer1
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	5.4.3
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Gentoo Packages
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Frank 2015-10-19 17:14:23 UTC

When using 5 virtual desktops, the session manager has no meaningful function for me.
If I use "restore manually saved session" it pops all of them onto the first virtual desktop on top of each other.
If I use "restore last session" then most programs aren't restored at all, only a few such as konsole, and these again on first desktop.

Install base is yesterdays git-master version.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Choose restore manually saved sessions
2. Reboot via kde menu
3. Relogin

Actual Results:  
All dumped on virtual desktop 1

Expected Results:  
It should pop up on the right desktop, where they were

Comment 1 darkflame 2015-12-04 18:08:26 UTC

I confirm this bug on Kubuntu 15.10 updated from KDE backports (kf5 5.15.0-0ubuntu1).

Comment 2 kdebugs.anon134 2016-01-01 15:42:48 UTC

I am having also having the problem where if I use "restore last session", then most programs aren't restored at all, only a few.

I rely heavily of the "restore last session", so this is a VERY significant problem for me, so much that it is preventing me from permanently moving to Plasma 5.  This is very disappointing.  :(

My System:
openSUSE Leap 42.1 for x86_64
plasma5-workspace v5.5.2-158.1
KDE Platform Version 4.14.10

Comment 3 kdebugs.anon134 2016-01-01 15:46:26 UTC

I forgot to add that this bug is 100% repeatable, every time.

Comment 4 Wolfgang Bauer 2016-02-22 14:13:42 UTC

(In reply to kdebugs.anon134 from comment #2)
> I am having also having the problem where if I use "restore last session",
> then most programs aren't restored at all, only a few.

AIUI, this bug report is about applications being restored on the wrong virtual desktop.
Something I cannot reproduce here with openSUSE's latest KDE Framworks and Qt5 packages btw, but we added a few patches for those problems already.

KF5 based applications not being restored at all is bug#354724, which has been fixed recently.

Comment 5 Wolfgang Bauer 2016-02-22 14:17:52 UTC

PS: the "virtual desktops" problem sounds just like bug#338578.

Any objections if I mark this as duplicate?

Comment 6 Frank 2016-05-14 12:35:02 UTC

No objections to mark this duplicate. The  bug#338578 should be marked confirmed / grave then however. Several people have the same problem and consider this a grave regression / bug.

Comment 7 Frank 2016-10-02 13:46:02 UTC

With 5.7.5 in the meantime the issue appears to get "better", eg not all programs that used to be are now dumped on the first desktop. But some still are.

And this bug or the duplicates of it are still not marked confirmed - I guess the lession is don't even try to use a kde version that is not at least 5 years in full production use by the major distributions. 8-(

Comment 8 Wolfgang Bauer 2016-10-03 14:02:44 UTC

(In reply to Frank from comment #7)
> With 5.7.5 in the meantime the issue appears to get "better", eg not all
> programs that used to be are now dumped on the first desktop. But some still
> are.

And which applications exactly?

The problem with kwin not saving/restoring window attributes (like position and virtual desktop) has been fixed over a year ago, see bug#341930.

But the applications need to set certain attributes correctly for this to work.
And in particular Qt5 didn't do that (so it still didn't work for KF5/Qt5 based applications), this should be fixed to in 5.6 at least.

> And this bug or the duplicates of it are still not marked confirmed

Which "duplicates" are you talking about in particular?
bug#354724 is fixed, bug#338578 is 2 years old and nobody apparently looked at it since then. AFAICT, it is fixed though (and actually a duplicate of bug# )

> I guess the lession is don't even try to use a kde version that is not at
> least 5 years in full production use by the major distributions. 8-(

If you think such a comment is helpful at all, then you're wrong.

Btw, openSUSE did backport all necessary fixes to previous versions months ago, and it works fine here since then AFAICT.
Also, all of the problems should be fixed in current versions of Plasma, KDE Frameworks and Qt5 as mentioned.

But if an application does something wrong, there's not much the desktop can do about it either.

Just as a side note, GNOME doesn't restart applications on login at all by default. You can enable it with some "hidden" dconf setting, but it still won't work with GTK applications, as they don't support the current (introduced in 1993!) session management protocol, and GNOME dropped support for the older one 10 years ago.
Funny enough, KDE/Qt applications do get restored correctly (now) in GNOME as well.

Apparently session management is just not considered that important any more nowadays...

Comment 9 Wolfgang Bauer 2016-10-03 14:04:44 UTC

(In reply to Wolfgang Bauer from comment #8)
> bug#354724 is fixed, bug#338578 is 2 years old and nobody apparently looked
> at it since then. AFAICT, it is fixed though (and actually a duplicate of
> bug# )
Sorry, forgot to insert the bug number here.

This should read:
AFAICT, it is fixed though (and actually a duplicate of bug#341930)

Comment 10 Frank 2017-11-18 16:45:05 UTC

Just to pick up on this after some time: After about 8 months I retried whether this problem has vanished in the meantime and indeed in version 5.37 all seems fixed.

Comment 11 Wolfgang Bauer 2017-11-23 20:32:32 UTC

Ok, thanks for confirming. ;)