Windowing subsystem components

[megabyte]

All of a sudden yesterday, my Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64bit desktop froze. I used killall -HUP cinnamon in TTY1 and came back to TTY7 to find a dialog stating that Cinnamon was now in fallback mode and asked if I wished to restart it. I elected not to restart it as I had unsaved work in the session and thought I remembered that this kills all applications running in the GUI environment underneath Cinnamon.

However almost immediately after, the GUI again started to ask weird... The menu changed design; There was no more Close, Minimise, Maximise, etc controls at the top of each window; Pressing Alt+Tab didn't display a list of opening windows; Clicking the windows in the taskbar didn't result in their windows displaying and taking focus; While I could open new applications, the menus in those applications didn't display when clicked. See below for a picture of the screen elements mentioned above.



Trying killall -HUP cinnamon didn't result in any GUI changes/messages this time, so I did some research which all seemed to suggest that Cinnamon needed restarting, so I tried the below commands (despite ptree stating it was seemingly running), with the seen-below results.



My guess at this point is that there is another component to the GUI system on Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64bit that draws the missing components that is not currently running, but in searches for what GUI components run in the aforementioned version of Mint, have only been able to find the Panel, Taskbar, Window Manager, and Desktop component names for the Xcfe version (viewtopic.php?t=71858).

Can anyone help me at least restore my ability to save the work in the open programs, or bring back full functionality of the GUI environment this time which I am sure will be helpful for future occurrences also?

[mdavies5]

The commands in your screenshot are illegible but no matter. Have you tried cinnamon --replace in a terminal?
In my experience whenever Cinnamon crashes I always opt to restart when asked and have never lost any running applications.

[megabyte]

MDavies5 - Sorry about the screenshots. The site restricts pixel dimensions of images, and so had to reduce density to upload. Bigger versions can be found where I have otherwise posted this question - https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... rn-to-full

As for the suggested command. I finally got the change to try it (and realised why the last time I tried something similar, as shown in the screenshot that is hard to view here, it didn't work). However the corrected command produces something rather similar than running without the --replace switch:

Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
Windows manager error: Unable to open X display

Any further ideas? Also, can you advise what window subsystem components the 18.1 Cinnamon version of Mint uses?

[catweazel]

The site restricts pixel dimensions of images, and so had to reduce density to upload.

You can post better quality images here: http://postimages.org/, then copy the URL for "Hotlink for Forums" and simply paste that link into your post. For example: