How to make the Dim Inactive (Darken inactive windows) desktop effect function?

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1

There is this effect in the Desktop Effects page in system settings application called Dim Inactive (Darken inactive windows). I have a similar effect on GNOME on Ubuntu and I want on Manjaro too. Can somebody tell me how to make it work?

image

I have these settings in the effect and I have pressed the Apply button in the main settings window and restarted the OS, but this does not work.

image

If not possible, can someone at least tell me how to make the drop shadow appear behind the windows, just the reverse of what you can see with the window in the screenshot above?

Thank you very much! Great OS and great community! :smiley:

2

Hi!
It looks like the compositor is not running, can you check at System Settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor, the Enable compositor at startup option and enable it if it’s disabled and reboot

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Thank you! It was disabled, I will reboot now.

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4

You’re welcome! :slight_smile: hope it worked

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5

This is what resulted:

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image974×700 57.8 KB

I am going to press that button to reactivate OpenGL detection.

6

Switch to OpenGL 3.1
I don’t see anywhere mentioning what GPU you have. Usually i disable Allow applications to block compositing.

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7

What type of GPU do you have, is it integrated (like Intel HD Graphics) or dedicated (like Nvidia)? Make sure you have the correct drivers installed, otherwise you could try to do what the message suggests, which is to try the ‘XRender’ backend instead of OpenGL which might not be fully compatible with your graphics and caused the crash

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8

I clicked on that button, rebooted, and everything works just as I wanted.

My GPU is, as taken from neofetch output,

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile.

9

Well, if you keep having problems, first check if you have the correct drivers installed for your graphics card, and also try to use OpenGL 3.1 not 2, or switch to XRender

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10

Marked @rrobertobt answer as solution, but to check also what drivers you have installed, run from terminal:
inxi -Fazy
also
mhwd -li
It will not reveal any unwanted information if you share it here. With that GPU your system should be running like a rocket.

2 Likes
11

Thank you all! I switched to OpenGL 3.1 and this is the output of inxi -Fazy:

System:
  Kernel: 5.8.11-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A 
  parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.8-x86_64 
  root=UUID=d6a72d1f-3160-46db-80c7-2c374ed21471 rw quiet apparmor=1 
  security=apparmor udev.log_priority=3 
  Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.19.5 tk: Qt 5.15.1 wm: kwin_x11 dm: SDDM 
  Distro: Manjaro Linux 
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: HP product: OMEN by HP Laptop 17-cb0xxx v: N/A 
  serial: <filter> Chassis: type: 10 serial: <filter> 
  Mobo: HP model: 8603 v: 45.40 serial: <filter> UEFI: AMI v: F.23 
  date: 02/18/2020 
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 65.9 Wh condition: 65.9/70.1 Wh (94%) volts: 17.4/15.4 
  model: COMPAL PABAS0241231 type: Li-ion serial: <filter> status: Full 
  Device-1: hidpp_battery_0 
  model: Logitech G305 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse serial: <filter> 
  charge: 100% (should be ignored) rechargeable: yes status: Discharging 
CPU:
  Topology: 6-Core model: Intel Core i7-9750H bits: 64 type: MT MCP 
  arch: Kaby Lake family: 6 model-id: 9E (158) stepping: A (10) microcode: D6 
  L2 cache: 12.0 MiB 
  flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx 
  bogomips: 62431 
  Speed: 800 MHz min/max: 800/4500 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 800 2: 800 3: 800 
  4: 800 5: 800 6: 800 7: 800 8: 800 9: 800 10: 800 11: 800 12: 801 
  Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: KVM: VMX disabled 
  Type: l1tf 
  mitigation: PTE Inversion; VMX: conditional cache flushes, SMT vulnerable 
  Type: mds mitigation: Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable 
  Type: meltdown mitigation: PTI 
  Type: spec_store_bypass 
  mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp 
  Type: spectre_v1 
  mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization 
  Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Full generic retpoline, IBPB: conditional, 
  IBRS_FW, STIBP: conditional, RSB filling 
  Type: srbds mitigation: Microcode 
  Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected 
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU106M [GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile] vendor: Hewlett-Packard 
  driver: nvidia v: 440.100 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm bus ID: 01:00.0 
  chip ID: 10de:1f11 
  Device-2: Cheng Uei Precision Industry (Foxlink) HP Wide Vision HD 
  Integrated Webcam 
  type: USB driver: uvcvideo bus ID: 1-5:4 chip ID: 05c8:03bc 
  Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9 compositor: kwin_x11 driver: nvidia 
  display ID: :0 screens: 1 
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 5759x1200 s-dpi: 124 s-size: 1180x246mm (46.5x9.7") 
  s-diag: 1205mm (47.5") 
  Monitor-1: HDMI-0 res: 3840x1200 dpi: 93 size: 1052x329mm (41.4x13.0") 
  diag: 1102mm (43.4") 
  Monitor-2: DP-2 res: 1920x1080 dpi: 128 size: 382x215mm (15.0x8.5") 
  diag: 438mm (17.3") 
  OpenGL: renderer: GeForce RTX 2060/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 440.100 
  direct render: Yes 
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Cannon Lake PCH cAVS vendor: Hewlett-Packard 
  driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel alternate: snd_soc_skl,snd_sof_pci 
  bus ID: 00:1f.3 chip ID: 8086:a348 
  Device-2: NVIDIA TU106 High Definition Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard 
  driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.1 chip ID: 10de:10f9 
  Device-3: C-Media Audio Adapter type: USB 
  driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid bus ID: 1-2.1.2:8 
  chip ID: 0d8c:000c 
  Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.11-1-MANJARO 
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] driver: iwlwifi v: kernel 
  bus ID: 00:14.3 chip ID: 8086:a370 
  IF: wlp0s20f3 state: down mac: <filter> 
  Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet 
  vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: r8169 v: kernel port: 3000 bus ID: 3c:00.0 
  chip ID: 10ec:8168 
  IF: enp60s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-1: br-4ed8977b4f26 state: down mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-2: br-81ea752696cf state: down mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-3: br-a9899d2bfe75 state: down mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-4: br-b15c6b70b314 state: down mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-5: br-b396320647a9 state: down mac: <filter> 
  IF-ID-6: docker0 state: down mac: <filter> 
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 1.84 TiB used: 104.52 GiB (5.5%) 
  SMART Message: Unable to run smartctl. Root privileges required. 
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung model: MZVLB1T0HBLR-000H1 
  size: 953.87 GiB block size: physical: 512 B logical: 512 B speed: 31.6 Gb/s 
  lanes: 4 serial: <filter> rev: HPS0NEXF scheme: GPT 
  ID-2: /dev/sda type: USB vendor: Samsung model: PSSD T7 Touch 
  size: 931.51 GiB block size: physical: 512 B logical: 512 B serial: <filter> 
  scheme: MBR 
  SMART Message: Unknown USB bridge. Flash drive/Unsupported enclosure? 
RAID:
  Hardware-1: Intel 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] driver: ahci 
  v: 3.0 port: 5020 bus ID: 00:17.0 chip ID: 8086.282a rev: 10 
Partition:
  ID-1: / raw size: 65.19 GiB size: 63.92 GiB (98.05%) used: 52.17 GiB (81.6%) 
  fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
Swap:
  Kernel: swappiness: 60 (default) cache pressure: 100 (default) 
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 19.53 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 
  dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4 
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 54.0 C mobo: 10.0 C gpu: nvidia temp: 46 C 
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:
  Processes: 298 Uptime: 6m Memory: 15.51 GiB used: 3.52 GiB (22.7%) 
  Init: systemd v: 246 Compilers: gcc: 10.2.0 Packages: 1372 pacman: 1367 
  lib: 363 flatpak: 0 snap: 5 Shell: fish v: 3.1.2 running in: konsole 
  inxi: 3.1.05

And the output for mhwd -li:

> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    video-nvidia-440xx            2019.10.25               false            PCI


Warning: No installed USB configs!
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That looks fairly fine.
There are a couple of things i do for Kwin and the /etc/X11/mhwd.d/nvidia.conf on my end, but probably is not required for your case to go that road. See how things go after this, and in case you notice some inconsistencies again, give us a ping. :wink:

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