Version: unspecified (using KDE 4.6.3) OS: Linux When I check Enable button, and then press Apply, A pop-up notification appears saying Your settings have been saved but as KDE is currently running running in failsafe mode desktop effects cannot be enabled at this time. ... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Start system settings and go to Workspace Appearance -> Desktop effects. Check Enable desktop effects. Press Apply Actual Results: A pop-up notification appears saying Your settings have been saved but as KDE is currently running running in failsafe mode desktop effects cannot be enabled at this time. ... Expected Results: Apply should work properly. I was doing that as a normal user. Actually - if it may or may not have any influence - I have installed akmod-nvidia, etc., and I am using native nvidia driver. I'm not sure if I tried the above "Enable" before that. On my Fedora 14 machine, in an analogous situation everything works as it should. Perhaps there is a way to exit KDE's failsafe mode - which I'm not aware of - but this is not right anyway, because I did not turn on the failsafe mode myself, and do not expect it in this situation at all. It is the same behaviour with the default Workspace appearance settings... Although I was trying to use some more fancy ones: Crystal for window decorations Glassified for Desktop theme Spline4 for splash screen
Compositing is not activated in _failsafe_ mode by purpose, so this is no bug at all. The session type "failsafe" is probably pre-selected at KDM (the login screen) either by yourself or due to repeating crashes on login attempts, which may even likely caused by the compositor and broken X11 drivers (a client should not be able to crash the X11 server _ever_, therefore this is no KDE bug either), possibly because nouveau was in use before. I don't know much about the failsafe session handling, how hard it is to detect or revert, so i just move the bug over to kdm, making it a "warn about failsafe modes" wish.
upstream kdm has no magic to automatically activate the failsafe session. whether it actually is selected can be verified by running "echo $DESKTOP_SESSION" in a shell. other than that, the lack of session choice visibility is a long-standing problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 74500 ***