Manjaro i3 in virtualbox - forced to restart i3 to refresh screen content

Support Virtualization
1

Hello everyone,

I run Manjaro KDE on my laptop and I am running VirtualBox on this machine. I created a virtual machine and I gave it half my ram (4GB out of 8) and half my CPU cores (4GB out of 8) and I installed Manjaro i3 in the VM.

The problem I have is that part of the content of the windows in i3 on the VM does not display unless I restart i3 (mod+shift+R). For instance, if I open a terminal window, the window does appear but the content of the window is not displayed. If I use the keyboard shortcut to restart i3, I can then see the content of the terminal window. If I start typing something in the terminal window, nothing new is displayed on the screen but then if I restart i3 again, what I typed previously in the terminal is now correctly displayed.

I am not sure whether this issue is i3 or virtualbox related but I never encountered any similar issues with i3 and I am new to virtualbox so my guess is that I have a problem with virtualbox. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading me.

Sincerely,

1 Like
2

It seems this is related to the video driver.
In virtualbox you could try to choose another.

What I just did was:
edit the configuration for the compositor (picom).

example:

nano ~/.config/picom.conf

change
backend = "glx"
to
backend = "xrender"

That seems to have done the trick for me in Virt-manager.

HTH

3

It worked. Thank you very much.

4

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