Problems with window transparency & behaviour after major update

Hello everyone!

This is my first post on the forum so, thanks in advance and thanks for all the previous help you provided me!

So, as the title says, I did a major update some days ago and started noticing “visual” differences but was not sure what it was. After some more usage I realized a couple of things:

  • The “Screen Edge” feature is not working: I use the top-left corner of the screen to show all opened windows. When I move the mouse there nothing is beign triggered, nothing happens.
  • When usign alt+tab I get not previews of the windows but only the app icon
  • When moving windows to the edges and letting plasma to do the resize I think that previously there was some kind of smooth transition effect but now I only get a black rectangle showing the new shape that the window is going to be resized to.
  • I have not transparency in windows/themes: For example Alacritty or Konsole show that cannot use/show using transparency. Also the Latte Dock docker transparency section on the config is deactivated.

I’m not sure what can I drop here to let you know about my system but I can tell you somethings:

  • Manjaro Stable
  • AMD Ryzen CPU
  • RX 580 Radeon GPU

Welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

All of the above are the result of compositing being disabled on your system. So check in the System Settings:arrow_down:

Hardware → Display and Monitor → Compositor → Enable compositor on startup

Make sure the rendering backend is set to OpenGL 3.1, although with (very) old hardware you might get better results with OpenGL 2.0 or XRender ─ note that the latter has no support for many of the effects, including blur on transparent windows.

The above all said, if you do not manage to get your compositor working again, then it’s most likely due to a video driver problem.

This would then particularly be related to proprietary Nvidia drivers (if you have an Nvidia GPU) and may also be related to the combination of such a driver with a particular kernel version. But in that case, I’m going to have to defer the issue to someone else here at the forum, because I don’t have any Nvidia hardware in my machine, and I don’t follow the current status of Nvidia driver support.

:slight_smile:

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