SUMMARY This started happening after the 5.23.0 release. Not sure if this is only on the Wayland session. Sometimes, when switching activities (via a hotkey), the animation starts lagging and a tiny 1x20px window with a grey background and the "Plasma Desktop Workspace" window title appears. This window is shown in the panel's task manager as it is a regular window type, and it is barely visible due to its size. When switching windows via alt+tab, this tiny 1x20px "Plasma Desktop Workspace" window is also shown, which is very annoying. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. set up two activities with a hotkey for cycling through the activities 2. press hotkey a couple of times OBSERVED RESULT Animation starts lagging and the tiny "Plasma Desktop Workspace" window appears SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux: Arch KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.87.0 Qt Version: 5.12.5 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
If I recall correctly, plasma creates an invisible window to receive key events when switching between activities.
Can confirm on Wayland.
*** Bug 443941 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Can confirm on X11
I can confirm too
Created attachment 142732 [details] Plasma Desktop Workspace task
I'm on 5.23.1/Tumbleweed and not using activities. I get this icon/window randomly when switching between workspaces. [Imgur](https://imgur.com/htzooak)
Still on 5.23.2 in Neon
*** Bug 444815 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 444375 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Raising priority due to the issue's visibility to users and number of duplicate reports.
Can confirm on EndeavourOS/Plasma 5.23.3. The window is named "Plasma" and stays visible in the taskbar.
It's from here: SwitcherBackend::keybdSwitchedToAnotherActivity()
I can confirm on Debian testing with plasma 5.23.3 and KF 5.88.0.
Git commit cad50cb7961b7ebe87b08334ea11ec2f83979680 by Nate Graham, on behalf of David Redondo. Committed on 16/12/2021 at 16:39. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. SwitcherBackend: Only create the workaround window on wayland Not needed on X M +1 -1 imports/activitymanager/switcherbackend.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/commit/cad50cb7961b7ebe87b08334ea11ec2f83979680
Git commit c8bcd716800b1e842301fbef8a0adf16d9042eb1 by Nate Graham, on behalf of David Redondo. Committed on 16/12/2021 at 17:14. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'Plasma/5.23'. SwitcherBackend: Only create the workaround window on wayland Not needed on X (cherry picked from commit cad50cb7961b7ebe87b08334ea11ec2f83979680) M +1 -1 imports/activitymanager/switcherbackend.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/commit/c8bcd716800b1e842301fbef8a0adf16d9042eb1
*** Bug 447212 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This still happens for me in NixOS, Plasma 5.23.5 Wayland. The attached patch explicitly affects only X11, so not sure why this bug got closed if the initial summary states this affects Wayland. In my case, when trying to alternate between two activities with keyboard shortcut (Meta+Tab), sometimes this 1px-wide window shows up on the current activity and "cancels" the switch, bringing me back to the activity I was trying to depart from, which is very annoying. Clicking on activity pager never causes this problem.
This issue is back in Plasma 6.3 beta. It looks exactly the same except the task switcher entry is simply labeled "plasmashell". It also not "sometime" - this is 100% of the time, where the time it remains open change wildly from less than a second to a few seconds (doesn't seem related to load and I have a pretty beefy system). System information: Operating System: KDE neon Testing Edition KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.90 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0 Qt Version: 6.8.1 Kernel Version: 6.8.0-51-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 20 × 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700H Memory: 31.0 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor 1: Intel® Graphics Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA RTX A2000 8GB Laptop GPU
How exactly are people switching activities to trigger this? Which exact global actions are you invoking using keyboard shortcuts?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #20) > How exactly are people switching activities to trigger this? Which exact > global actions are you invoking using keyboard shortcuts? I'm using Plasmashell's "Walk throught activities" (and not KWin's) custom shortcut, that I mapped to META+ALT+Tab
Thanks, I can reproduce the issue now. It seems to require the use of those shortcuts specifically, not the KWin-provided ones.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #22) > Thanks, I can reproduce the issue now. It seems to require the use of those > shortcuts specifically, not the KWin-provided ones. I actually just tried the kwin's "walk through activities" shortcuts, and they don't seem to do anything for me.