To make it clear, EVERYTHING is working except for the desktop screen, which seems to be completely irresponsible.
This only started today while I was using the PC to work on a project. Fast-forward to a few hours and I want to see the desktop and well it doesn’t work.
Desktop doesn’t appear, clicking on it does nothing and all it does it leaves an imprint of any windows I open.
Furthermore trying to reboot the WM or the PC doesn’t fix this, other partitions on the same PC hasn’t experienced this or any problems and I am just lost on where to find the cause of the problem.
You probably got the same xfdesktop crash as I got some time ago !
Check in /var/lib/systemd/coredump/ if you have some core.xfdesktop..... files and their creation dates.
You may also check in journalctl for xfdesktop crashes. journalctl -p4 --no-page |grep xfdesktop
My problem was due to a “bad” background file when the desktop changed from another to this one. I deleted the file, restored xfce4-desktop.xml with a backuped one in /home/denis/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ and restarted session or rebooted : problem solved.
This file is properly opened in gthumb or gimp, but appears as a black box in the file chooser for the desktop background. With xfce 18, this file appeared as black on the background when chosen, but created no crash. So xfce 20 enhancement
I didn’t realize one of my background images were in webp format (which I already knew was not supported), which was the “bad” background image, just had to convert it to jpg and reboot, problem fixed
Strange : my “bad” image was a jpg one, and the background directory is full of webp images that the desktop don’t “see” nor use as backgrounds.
[Edit] Well, I checked the file properties, and yes it’s a webp hidden within a jpg file ! Converted to a real jpg and back to the background directory. I will soon see if xfdesktop crashes when it selects this file
[Edit 2] No more problem with the real jpg file
So xfdesktop dispays .jpg files, skips .webp files and crashes with a webp file with a .jpg extension.
Yes I’ve just confirmed this myself that it has to be a true jpg image.
I also just found this link that also talks about jpg being corrupted and causing a crash xfdesktop crashes when showing a corrupt JPEG which has been fixed but hasn’t been shipped yet.
