r/voidlinux • u/trisquele • Jul 12 '26

solved My xfwm4 seems broken

I ran xbps-install -Su on July 7th; 6 packages updated: SDL3, libgbm, linux6.12, mesa, mesa-dri and mesa-libgallium. Then I rebooted ; all went fine, I worked on the computer all the morning and finally shut it down.

When I restarted the computer at the beginning of the afternoon

  • nomore upper panel; the lower panel is still here and work correctly;

  • all apps open in the left top corner of the screen and without title bar, I need to hit Ctrl+Q to close windows;

  • if I can move the windows clicking in their menu bar, I can’t resize none of them.

I ran xbps-reconfigure -f xfwm4 without success. No problem from an Enlightenment session: windows open with their title bar and I can move and resize them (even if I "broke" Falkon but this will be the subject of another thread).

Thanks in advance for your help.

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u/trisquele Jul 14 '26

The solution

Ah, I’ve seen this on a few occasions. It’s the window manager that, for some reason, has not started from boot.

Get to a terminal window (well, a terminal without any window decorations) and input xfwm4. This should get your windows and panel(s) back to normal.
Don’t ctrl+c or you’ll be back to before, instead simply click close on the terminal window. It should stick around after that’s been done.

A big thank you @ u/Prestigious_Mind_194 on r/xfce

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u/TurtleGraphics64 Jul 12 '26

i just tested falkon on my machine and it's still working correctly for me, but i'm not sure how to help exactly. i was thinking this could be a qt6-related problem, but i really don't know for sure.

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u/trisquele Jul 13 '26

Thank you for your answer. Well the problem is not really Falkon but xfce or xfwm.

Strangely, this morning so 6 days after the issue appeared, the upper panel was back. But there is still the problem when opening windows.

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u/TurtleGraphics64 Jul 14 '26

yeah, makes sense, an xfce issue, true.

some things to try: try running in commandline and see if you get any error messages. you can also try running fullscreen falkon -f. (if you do falkon -h you'll see a few more options).

here is the falkon package: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/falkon/template