<Solved> Strange window focus issue <Solved>

[Huecuva]

So after having run Mint on my HTPC quite happily for years, I've decided to dual boot my main gaming rig with Linux as well as Windows. I'm running Mint 19 Cinnamon and it seems like there is some kind of issue that I'm not having on my HTPC at all. It seems that windows will sometimes not lose focus when I go to another window. Windows will become completely unresponsive to the mouse and I have to alt-tab around between windows and use the tab and arrow keys to navigate and press buttons because only one window (or sometimes none of them) will respond to the mouse. It's a very strange issue to try and describe. The more windows there are open the more likely the problem is to occur and after only 4 or 5 windows things become completely unresponsive and I have to start alt-F4 closing windows blindly until they start responding to the mouse again. Sometimes the Applications menu is also unresponsive. That's usually when I have to start alt-F4ing. It's very frustrating.

Here are my specs:

Asrock B450 Pro mobo
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Sapphire Radeon RX580 Nitro+
16GB RAM
My mouse is a Madcatz Cyborg R.A.T. 7

Please let me know if there is any more detail you need.

EDIT: After upgrading to Mint 20, I no longer have this problem.

[Huecuva]

Nobody has any ideas?

After further messing around, it appears that newly opened windows do not have focus and will not respond to mouseclicks (though the mouse cursor does respond, changing accordingly based on what you hold it over) until I alt-tab to that window. Though as I mentioned, everything becomes unresponsive with a just a few windows open. It's maddening.

To top it off, I can't seem to change which OS grub boots into by default.

[Huecuva]

After installing grub-customizer, I was finally able to set Windows as the default OS to boot into. manually editing the /etc/default/grub wasn't working.

I'm still having the issue with window focus, though. Does anyone have any suggestions? All I can find about this issue online is about old versions of Ubuntu.

[Huecuva]

This issue seems to get worse the longer Mint is running, until not even one window will respond to the mouse and alt-tabbing is no longer working. When this happens, even the applications menu is completely unresponsive to the mouse and in order to restart or shut down the PC I have to use the keyboard to Ctrl-Alt-Del and then logout before the mouse will allow me to proceed further. Oddly, it seems I am able to click on the update manager try icon and open that, but nothing else will respond to mouse clicks.

Nobody knows anything about this? Seriously?

[smurphos]

Please post the full output of inxi -Fxzr run in a terminal.

[Huecuva]

Here it is:

https://pastebin.com/z3jMvQS0

[smurphos]

No bright ideas, I suspect some issue with your hardware and kernel version or the graphics card / mesa version but anything further than that would be pure guesswork. Does Ctrl / Alt / Esc to restart Cinnamon help at all?

Does dmesg | grep -i "error\|warn\|fail" produce any output?

[Huecuva]

Ctrl-Alt-Esc does work. Temporarily.

dmesg | grep -i "error\|warn\|fail" produces this:

Code: Select all

[    0.000000] ACPI BIOS Warning (bug): Optional FADT field Pm2ControlBlock has valid Length but zero Address: 0x0000000000000000/0x1 (20170831/tbfadt-658)
[    0.000000] tsc: Fast TSC calibration failed
[    0.028000] tsc: Fast TSC calibration failed
[    0.826276] RAS: Correctable Errors collector initialized.
[    1.500608] [drm] DM_PPLIB: Warning: using default validation clocks!
[    1.500611] [drm] DM_PPLIB: Warning: using default validation clocks!
[    5.087647] random: 7 urandom warning(s) missed due to ratelimiting
[    5.333474] EXT4-fs (nvme0n1p5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro

That doesn't look good.

[lsemmens]

I'm wondering if one of those windows might be Firefox, If I have been running that app for a period of time sometimes it load up the system to the point of slow or no response, As soon as I close FF and re-open it, problem goes away.

[Huecuva]

One of those windows is not Firefox. I dislike Firefox and have actually uninstalled it. My browser is Chromium. And this problem happens almost immediately upon boot if I start opening windows right away. It doesn't take much or very long at all. It pretty much renders Cinnamon completely unusable. If I am unable to fix this, I will end up having to install MATE.

What you're describing sounds like a memory leak problem. All tabbed browsers (even Chromium) seem to have some degree of memory leak issues, but this is not caused by that. The machine isn't slowing down because the RAM is all being used. The windows simply aren't responding to mouseclicks. Also, the rig I'm having trouble with has 16GB of RAM. I probably wouldn't notice much of a memory leak problem in Chromium if I could actually use it for any length of time.

[Huecuva]

Nobody has anything else to suggest? Am I going to have to install MATE just to be able to use Mint on my fancy new hardware? I'm pretty sure the issue is with Cinnamon. The compositing seems to cause all manner of inconvenience. I wish the devs could make Cinnamon without compositing.

[Huecuva]

Well, I've given up and installed MATE for now, though I still have Cinnamon installed. It would be nice to be able to use it, as it's the flashiest Linux DE and I know my hardware can handle it without breaking a sweat, but the fact is that Cinnamon just isn't usable on this rig. Though I do not have this problem with it at all on my ASUS P5K-VM Q6600 HTPC, so it must be that my hardware is too new, maybe? The issue seems to be similar to what this guy is describing in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=208&t=280741

I really hope this problem does not happen when I upgrade my HTPC to the core i3 I acquired. MATE is not an option for that rig.

[Huecuva]

On a whim, I just decided to try logging into Cinnamon with software rendering. It seems to be working without a problem, though it's not as pretty. This is possibly an incompatibility with the AMD graphics driver.

[Huecuva]

And now this is happening in MATE, as well. Even worse than it was in Cinnamon. It started after I installed ldmtool and ran sudo ldmtool create all to access my Windows RAID. Even the menu basically becomes completely unresponsive after opening only one application. However, if I go use ctrl-alt-F1 to TTY1 and then ctrl-alt-F7 back to MATE desktop, everything is fine again.

Maddening.

[MrEen]

Like smurphos mentioned, I would guess kernel/hardware. I would see if upgrading the kernel to 4.18 fixes this.

[Huecuva]

I just followed the upgrade path and upgraded to 19.1. CPU-X now reports that I am using Kernel 4.15 and the update manager does not give me the option of upgrading to 4.18. This problem is still happening. I should not need to manually upgrade my kernel if the kernel in question has been available as early as August 2018, but I will anyway.

EDIT:

So I've upgraded my kernel to 4.18. CPU-X is now reporting that that is the kernel running. This problem is still happening. Even now, I had to close CPU-X in order for the task panel to respond correctly to the mouse and then once I clicked on Chromium, I still had to alt-tab to it, even though it was the only application open and dominated my entire screen, before I could click on the correct tab to post this.

[MrEen]

and the update manager does not give me the option of upgrading to 4.18.

Umm, I thought 19.x users now had 4.18 series kernels available to install. I think you possibly have more issues than just the window focus. I'm on 18.3 still so wait for others to confirm.

Also, did you add MATE to your Cinnamon install, or install it to a separate partition?

[Huecuva]

I added MATE to my Cinnamon install. I will probably end up just fresh installing 19.1.

[Huecuva]

Alright,

So I haven't fresh installed 19.1 on my main rig yet, but I have fresh installed it on a completely different rig and it is still using kernel 4.15, not 4.18. It also does not have the option to use that kernel in the update manager. I don't think kernel 4.18 is supported by Mint yet, which is odd because I was looking through older posts about this and people were trying to get 4.18 in Mint even back in November. I don't think the kernel is the problem with my main rig having weird focus issues. Unless I need 4.19? Apparently 4.19 is a thing. Why is 4.18 not fully implemented in Mint if 4.19 is a thing already? I will probably try fresh installing anyway, but I am not hopeful that it will fix the issue I'm having.

[smurphos]

4.18.0.13 should be available in both 19 and 19.1 as an optional install via Update manager > View > Linux Kernels.

4.15 is the default series as it's the LTS so you don't get offered an update.