16.04 Libertine opens EVERYTHING in a new window

[Yougo]

Hi, I can’t imagine no one has noticed this yet but couldn’t find anything about it yet. Feel free to merge/move this to where it belongs

Ever since updating to 16.04/devel, once libertine started working again, it works differently from how it was in 15.04.

It used to open everything an app did in the same window. Even new apps started by an app, like when you launch gedit from terminal. This was cumbersome, but the new situation is the other extreme: everything, tooltips, drop down menus, right-click menus, dialogue boxes, everything opens in a new window. Some middle road must be able to be achieved?

See also the github issue I made for it. https://github.com/ubports/libertine/issues/10

Does anyone have this problem too, and is there any way to fix it? Is this an xmir/mir/Xorg thing?

[killerbee]

I can confirm this, its not completely reproducable, as sometimes it doe snto open up new windows and kind of sometimes auto closes them after clicking on an entry.....
It is affecting all the apps I installed (firefox, thunderbird, gnome music player, vlc, ....)

[Yougo]

@killerbee indeed, so it's not depending on a specific toolkit (XUL, GTK3, QT, whatever libreoffice uses), but has to do with window classes not being recognized or not properly dealt with. which is a window manager thing.

Rodney told me on telegram that the problem might go away when we move from xmir to xwayland, but no idea on ETA on that

[killerbee]

probably 2050 after the climate change has swept away most parts of northern germany

[doniks]

@killerbee said in 16.04 Libertine opens EVERYTHING in a new window:

probably 2050 after the climate change has swept away most parts of northern germany

At which point we will have proven how UBports is stronger than the climate change. Makes you wonder about mankinds priorities

[doniks]

@yougo said in 16.04 Libertine opens EVERYTHING in a new window:

Does anyone have this problem too

Jup have it too. My assumption was that this is an intended feature development of xmir. But, seemingly a somewhat halfbaked feature that breaks many libertine use cases.

Does xmir have an existence outside of libertine? Maybe it makes sense on some canonical iot snap mir setup?

and is there any way to fix it?

I haven't checked, but maybe xmir has some command line switches that could influence this behaviour?!

[Yougo]

@doniks judging by how hot my FP2 can get, and FP2's are mostly found in northwestern Europe, do we have correlation?

[Yougo]

@doniks

it went from EVERYthing in the same xsession (and 1 xsession per window) to EVERYthing in a new window (don't know if it's multiple windows per xsession or worse, every gui item getting it's own xsession now)

i suspect xmir recently became aware of new windows, but either

1. still lacks the abilty to classify, or
2. has support for window classes but is not getting the proper instructions?

thinking about it, if every gui item gets it's own xsession, xmir is not wrong to give it a new window, so
3. xmir has support for window classes, probably gets the right instructions too, but only receives new xsessions == new window

how does Mir itself handle it? (don't have a mir session to play with on my pc)
/Edit:
Fun fact: i just tried with libreoffice on wayland and on Xorg: Wayland doesn't allow floating toolbars! i have to dock it somewhere, where on Xorg, i can have floating toolbars. the floating toolbar even shows on the panel as a separate window (tooltips and menus don't though)

[dobey]

@yougo They are definitely not new X sessions. That would imply starting another copy of Xmir on a new DISPLAY and having part of an app displayed there versus on the original DISPLAY, which is I am pretty sure, impossible.

It could be that the newer Xmir in 16.04 is now creating new Mir surfaces for each X11 window, where it was not doing so before (and really probably should not be doing so now).

[haveaniceday]

Is it possible to revert to the old behaviour, where the unity window basically is one x11 screen, containing everything?
Is Xmir still being developed by the Canonical Mir team?

[haveaniceday]

I found a work-around that reverts from the always-open-a-new-window behaviour to the old everything-in-one-single-windows. This way, menus in libertine kinda work again.

Open /usr/bin/libertine-xmir in an editor and change

exec Xmir -rootless $@

into

exec Xmir -rootless -flatten $@

This is the command with which libertine launches the Xmir instance. The -flatten parameter "Flatten(s) rootless X windows into a single surface" (from the Xmir --help). Note that the root partition must be writable, otherwise you can't edit the file.

The best option of course would be a more integrated handling of menus by mir itself. Maybe xwayland will resolve the issue, as @dobey mentioned.

[tuxus]

I tested this work-around on my M10FHD with xenial dev and in result LO crashes by start now.