I've just started using KDE after a long time with Gnome. I was having fun, going through the Desktop Effects, tweaking them to my liking, but at some point things got a little screwy. Now I can't be sure if the settings in the Desktop Effects module reflect the actual settings. The best example of this is the Logout effect (Desaturate the screen while the logout/shutdown prompt is up). I liked this effect and had it turned on, but after a while I noticed that it had stopped working. I checked and rechecked, and it was definitely turned on (according to the settings module) but even after suspending compositing, logging out, and even rebooting, the effect didn't take effect, and there was no notification about not being able to activate it. My final attempt to restore it was to deselect each and every effect one by one, reboot, and then turn them all back on again. That's when I noticed it, The logout effect is now only active when it is deactivated, and it is inactive when activated. Recently, the Present Windows effect stopped working and I'm not sure if it is related to the same issue or not. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? I checked kwinrc ($HOME/.kde/share/config/kwinrc) and it reflects the settings I see in the System Settings module. So why are some of them opposite of what they should be?

Just to make sure - you have desktop effects enabled all the time, right? Sometimes they can be deactivated, for example for some power profiles, if your computer is under heavy load etc.

Can you find any way to consistently reproduce this?

I have Magic Lamp, Wobbly Windows, and Shadows enabled, so it is pretty easy to notice when compositing has been disabled. Once I figured out how to get OpenGL compositing enabled, I've yet to turn it off except for when I'm on battery power. I got a screenshot of my settings, with kwinrc visible in the terminal.

Fullsize: http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/5080/snapshot6l.png

I tried to get a capture of the logout to demonstrate the desaturate effect is active with these settings showing it off, but you cant screen capture while the logout dialog is visible so I didn't bother grabbing more captures, but trust me, to deactivate the desaturate effect I must activate it in the effects menu.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to reproduce the problem without fixing it first. The only time this setting wasn't reversed was when I first upgraded to KDE4.

It seems all the other effects are correct, I may have been mistaken about Present Windows not working, it works now.

Perhaps your kwinrc file has been corrupted? Please try the following:

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kquitapp kwin && sleep 10s && killall -9 kwin && rm -f $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/kwin* && kwin --replace &

Alright, done. The final command kwin --replace & resulted in

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kwin: No process found

So i ran kwin &

Logout effect is still reverse of what its setting indicates. Should this string of commands (mostly the rm of kwin related config files) reset my settings? No settings were changed.

kwin gave me some information when it restarted though:

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X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0x1200029
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)
WARNING: Application calling GLX 1.3 function "glXCreatePixmap" when GLX 1.3 is not supported!  This is an application bug!
WARNING: Application calling GLX 1.3 function "glXQueryDrawable" when GLX 1.3 is not supported!  This is an application bug!
WARNING: Application calling GLX 1.3 function "glXDestroyPixmap" when GLX 1.3 is not supported!  This is an application bug!


It is probable the command stopped at killall -9 kwin.
Please try the following instead:

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kquitapp kwin && sleep 10s && rm -f $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/kwin* && kwin --replace &

Well, that seemed to successfully knock out the settings. Now I'm unable to reactivate desktop effects though. Let me try to log out and back in again.

OK, upon logging back in I could reenable desktop effects. The Logout effect was on (by default?) so I tested the logout dialog and there was no desaturate effect (there should have been). I tried turning off the Logout effect and there was still no desaturate. So something is different now, but not exactly fixed.

Ok, I would suggest filing a bug at bugs.kde.org. In this case, it could be that certain parts of the effect are not supported by your hardware or driver, and are being silently and automatically disabled/skipped by KWin.

Ok, upon further inspection, it looks like the logout effect is doing something, however earlier it would completely desaturate the desktop, leaving it black and white, now it only does so slightly, yet there are no settings for it?

Yeah, the driver is i915, which seems to have some problems.

Ahah! I think I get it now. The logout effect says that it desaturates the screen, which it does slightly. What I was unaware of is that there is a non-compositing effect which fully desaturates the screen. Now what was really confusing is that with compositing active and the Logout desktop effect deactivated, this non-compositing effect shouldn't be visible. That is the state that you have now restored for me.

The actual bug then was that this non-compositing effect was somehow active while compositing was active, I would see it when Logout effect was disabled, but I wouldn't when the Logout effect was active (which was desaturating the screen slightly but I thought that it was having no effect in comparison to the black and white result of the non-compositing logout effect). I can only assume that the corruption occurred because I had been twidling with the options a lot.

It looks like there is already a bug report for this, which is where I discovered these findings.

How do you mark a post as solved?

I notice that the bug I have commented on at bugs.kde.org is quite old. Should I create a new bug report even thought it will obviously be a duplicate of the one I have already supplied information to? Will anyone actually see that I have confirmed the bug and that it is now reproducible? Also the bug seems to be associated with the wrong piece of software, ksmserver instead of kwin.

Since this seems to be a KWin issue, I moved the topic to the KWin subforum.

UnknownUser wrote:How do you mark a post as solved?

Click on under the post with the solution.

UnknownUser wrote:I notice that the bug I have commented on at bugs.kde.org is quite old. Should I create a new bug report even thought it will obviously be a duplicate of the one I have already supplied information to? Will anyone actually see that I have confirmed the bug and that it is now reproducible? Also the bug seems to be associated with the wrong piece of software, ksmserver instead of kwin.

Not sure about that. Can you please link to the bug?

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230629

I'm pathologically impatient to a fault, so I tried to get the bug in the right place, I think I ended up creating a new bug,

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269110

I've never used these types of bug reporting things before, so I worry that I may have inadvertently spammed some people by doing this.