Screen Refresh Glitch When Switching Workspaces

[AviJ]

Hi, all. First of all, kudos to Kendall and the team on a fantastic release of a wonderful distro. I have Peppermint running on two machines: an Acer TravelMate 290 (I'm running Peppermint 3 due to PAE issues, but will try to intall Peppermint 5 using forcepae), and an Acer Aspire One. They both run smoothly and pretty fast, considering the dinosaur processors and low RAM on these machines.

I do have one small disappointment with Peppermint 5, though, which is the screen refresh glitch that occurs when using the Page Switcher to switch workplaces. Most bugs in new distros are not a big thing and get fixed (or workarounded) quickly, but this one actually comes with a dire warning in the Release Notes stating that it will probably never be fixed. I understand that this is an lxpanel issue and not a Peppermint issue, but is there some workaround or remedy for this? Perhaps forcing an older version of lxpanel?

Thanks again for a great distro, and I'd appreciate any advice.

Best,
Avi

[PCNetSpec]

Hi AviJ, and welcome to the forum.

As I understand it, the tiny little desktop windows in the bottom panel don't quite display the window positions exactly as they are .. is this really that big of a deal ?

Surely you can just switch to the other desktop and have a look where they are

[AviJ]

No, that's not the main issue for me, and I'm not sure that is the issue described in the release notes. What happens with me is that when I switch to another workspace, only a portion of the screen is refreshed, and most of the screen continues to display artifacts from what was showing on the previous workspace. The only way I can refresh the new workspace is either to drag my cursor around it, or to maximize and then unmaximize an app on that screen.

[PCNetSpec]

Ahh .. many apologies 

I could be wrong but that doesn't sound like a pane applet problem to me .. sounds more graphics driver related .. does it do the same thing if you switch desktops via the keyboard shortcuts ?

Does disabling the compositor help ?

menu > Preferences > Peppermint Control Center > Desktop Effects (tab)

and take the tick out of "Enable Desktop Effects" ?

you might also want to try ticking the "Synchronize drawing to vertical blank" (with effects enabled).

[AviJ]

Thanks, PCNetSpec. Yes, disabling the compositor solves the problem. Syncing to vertical blank has a negligible effect. It's a shame to have to give up the shadow effects and translucency, but it looks like that's the only way to solve the problem. Thanks again for your help.

[PCNetSpec]

You could try adding the effects back in with the "compton" compositor .. maybe it's just the Xfwm4 compositor that's causing the issue.

Gimme a shout if you need/want help with this

[AviJ]

Thanks, PCNetSpec. Yes, please -- I'd love to know how to use the "compton" compsitor. If it's not too complicated, I'll give it a try. Otherwise, I can totally live without the shadows and translucency. I look forward to your post.

[PCNetSpec]

OK, it looks like compton is now in the repositories

so install it with:

Code: [Select]

apt install compton

then with the desktop effects disabled in the Peppermint Control Center, run this in a terminal:

Code: [Select]

compton -cC

DO NOT close that terminal or compton will exit .. but we'll get around to autostarting it at bootup if it works.

The above compton options give you dropshadows, but not under dock bars

You can see other compton options by running:

Code: [Select]

man compton

You could also try adding transparency of inactive windows with

Code: [Select]

compton -cC -i 0.8

but that really slowed down dragging windows around for me

Once you're sure you want t5o use it .. and know what the command is to get your ideal setup .. post that command here, and I'll tell you how to autostart compton with those settings.

[AviJ]

Thanks, PCNetSpec. I'll give compton a try. How do you feel about the compton-conf (https://github.com/lxde/compton-conf) GUI configuration tool for Compton? I'm happy to manually edit config files and use command options if I need to, but I feel safer with a GUI tool.

If I decide to autostart, am I correct that a viable way to do this is to write a .sh script with the appropriate command and then write a corresponding .desktop file that points to that script and place it in my ~/.config/autostart/ directory? This is what I have done, for example, with setxkbmap to get my keyboard layouts to autostart.

Thanks again for your help with this.

[AviJ]

Well, I installed compton, as well as the compton-config package lsited above. compton-config provides a GUI for tweaking the ~/.config/compton.conf file. The conf file that compton-config installs by default is wild and wooly, with way too much transparency and other effects that are both ugly and slow down the machine. I replaced it with the config file I found here (http://duncanlock.net/blog/2013/06/07/how-to-switch-to-compton-for-beautiful-tear-free-compositing-in-xfce/ and scroll down to "Configure Compton"), and now I can continue to tweak the configuration using compton-conf if I ever wish to.

I added compton to my autostart by creating the following desktop file in /home/avi/.config/autostart :

Code: [Select]

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Compton
Exec=/usr/bin/compton
Icon=/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/devices/computer.png

And that was pretty much it. There are no arguments on the Exec line, because compton configures per the ~/.config/compton.conf file.

So I think I got everything right, and it looks great! Thanks for your help, PCNetSpec, and of course please do let me know if I've gotten anything wrong.