Jerome Yuzyk posted on Tue, 23 May 2017 23:53:05 -0600 as excerpted:
> [KDE 4.14.30 on Fedora 25]
>
> The darnedest thing: suddenly I can't move a window by grabbing the
> title bar.
> Neither full height windows nor dialogs. Others have reported this, but
> mostly in past releases. It seems I need to kill the kwin process and
> restart it with "kwin --replace". Failing that, logout and back in. I'd
> rather not do that.
>
> First off, I don't have a "kwin" process, though I do have a "kwin_x11"
> process. Secondly, is "kwin --replace" the right way to start kwin?
Using the replace option is indeed the correct way, and yes, it's kwin_x11
now, tho I had /thought/ that change was in plasma5 for kde-frameworks5,
not kde4, which would make sense given that the devs didn't really focus
on wayland porting and thus need the _x11 specifier suffix until 5. I'm
a gentooer not a fedora guy[1], so wouldn't know, but are you sure you're
not getting that 4.14.30 off of the legacy kdelibs4 that's still around
to support apps that haven't been ported to frameworks5 yet, and you're
actually running the plasma5 by kde desktop?
FWIW, running (in a terminal window, konsole or whatever) ldd
/path/to/kwin_x11 should confirm one way or the other for sure, as it'll
either list libQt5* and libKF5* libs, or qt4/kde4 versions. If it's the
5 versions as I expect, it's plasma5.
Of course you can probably query your package manager to see what package
and version contains the kwin_x11 file, but how to do that is package
manager specific, and my telling you how to do it on gentoo using portage
isn't going to help you much. But ldd is standard, shipped as a
troubleshooting script by glibc, unless your distro has split it out
separately.
Anyway... with xorg at least, there's exactly one window manager allowed,
so pretty much any window manager should either replace whatever else is
the current window manager by default, or have a parameter like kwin's
--replace, to do it. If kwin is not run with the --replace parameter,
it'll check to see if another window manager is already running, and will
simply quit if so -- --replace is required to actually replace an
existing window manager (including an earlier copy of kwin itself). So
yes, running it with the --replace parameter is correct. =:^)
Of course if you're running wayland the rules will differ a bit. I'm not
running it yet here, so don't know the details, but I guess Fedora 25
runs wayland by default, with a gnome shell session anyway. What it does
for a kde/plasma session I don't know, tho I'd guess it doesn't run
wayland by default for kde/plasma, as while they're working on it, plasma
on wayland definitely wasn't ready for fedora 25, and while from reports
it's working reasonably well in live-git plasma now, I seriously doubt
it'll make it into fedora 26, either, but may well make fedora 27.
FWIW, I'm actually running live-git kde-frameworks/plasma/apps here (via
the gentoo/kde project's overlay ebuilds), and due to various normally
temporary instability issues with the live-git builds, I have a variety
of hotkey shortcuts setup to reset/restart various plasma components,
including krunner, plasmashell (was plasma-desktop in kde4), kwin_x11,
sni-proxy (the applet that provides compatibility for legacy tray applets
that don't do things the new way yet), etc, should they go unstable and
need reset/restarted. =:^)
So here when kwin starts acting up on me, I just hit a couple keys to
trigger the hotkey launcher for it, and I'm back in business. And yes,
kwin_x11 --replace is exactly what the kwin relauncher is configured to
do. =:^)
---
[1] I always did dislike hats, unless it's down near or below freezing.
Might that be related to the fact that I never was much one for red hat,
preferring mandrake even back when I did binary-based distros (I've been
on gentoo for nearing a decade and a half, now, as I quickly outgrew
binary distros along with my Linux newbie status and wanted more control
over my own systems than the binary distros normally give you)? Hard to
say, but I suppose it's possible it had some subconscious biasing effect.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
