window manager shadow disappeared, how to get it back?

[rnclark]

In the seemingly constant marco and meticity window manager crashing, I have a new problem.

The shadow around the windows is gone. The shadow area was nice because it enabled a large area to grab to resize a window. Without that, the area for resizing is only about a pixel wide, and on a 140 ppi display, that is a small target to find. System is an I9 desktop, mint 20.1, mate, dual 4k monitors.

I've looked through many settings and compared them to settings on my mint 19.3 laptop that has the shadow area. Also, on the laptop, I've never had a window manager crash.

So how do I restore the window shadow (hope that is the right term)? I've rebooted and that doesn't fix it.

For other posts about window manager crashing, see:
viewtopic.php?f=206&t=345716&p=1991968#p1991968

[marlene]

Do you mean that one or both of these appliacations don't work even if you log out and back in?
Because loging out and back in restarts caja and/or metacity.

If that is the case then you might have some propblem with the mate installation.

If that isn't the case and one or both of these applications crashed during a session, the quick fix is either to restart any of these two manually from your terminal or kill them something that will force them to restart automatically.

Type on a terminal caja and that will start the file manager.
And type metacity to (re)start the window manager.

If both of them are running but not responding then the killall command on the terminal will do the job.

The commands that do this are

killall caja

and killall metacity.

That command kills the misbehaving running instance and theoritically can restart the applications.

These are the quick fixes in case you want to continue your work without having to log out. If the problem is persistent then you'll have to see which of the Mate components creates the problem and perhaps reconfigure them. Remove their connfiguration files and re condigure them, or reinstall the packages in case you messed up with your system and you deleted accidentally something.

[rnclark]

> Do you mean that one or both of these appliacations don't work even if you log out and back in?

No, they are working. And the two applications that crash are marco and meticity; caja is fine. Please see the link I posted to another discussion on window manager crashing. They crash on certain window closings. To recover without logging out, after a marco crash, I start meticity, then change back to marco. This has worked multiple times with no isses and full functionality back.

But the last time marco crashed and I did the above restart, the shadow area around the windows didn't show up. I logged out, rebooted, logged back in and still no shadow.

But after I typed the above, I decided to try again. Without logging out, I switched from marco to meticity, then back to marco (with compositing), and magically, the shadow is back. Weird.

I just wish the segfault causing the window manager to crash on window closings would be fixed. It was not a problem in mint 19 and before. But I would like to know what setting makes the window shadows.

[all41]

Have you tried the 5.8 series kernel for that i9?
also the shadow effect requires a window manager with compositing

[rnclark]

I am using the 5.8 kernel and all the latest updates. Kernel = 5.8.0-48

After my last post regarding getting the shadow back, I found the the focus follows mouse was gone, so I had to log out and back in anyway.