Bug in xfce settings window

[flyingrhino]

LM 20.1 xfce installed on Asus UX302 laptop.

When you resize the settings window horizontally (to make it wider), you cannot resize it back to make it narrow again.
Closing and opening this window doesn't help.
Reboot doesn't help either.

You can resize vertically though.

[MrEen]

I just tried this in a VM and both the Live and installed version resized back down to their original size. There is a minimum size on this window that you can't reduce, but expanding out to the sides of the monitor and back worked fine.

I'm assuming you're talking about the Settings Manager window. And if so, we can see if there's something hinky in the window settings with this command:

Code: Select all

xfconf-query -c xfce4-settings-manager -lv

[secureIT]

I am on Mint 20.1 xfce Ulyssa

I can confirm what flyingrhino said:

In the original size of the Settings Manager window, the icons were arranged in 4 columns.

After changing the horizontal size of the window, the icons were arranged in 7 columns.

The horizontal size cannot be changed even after calling it up again,

and remains with the representation of the icons in 7 columns and the bigger window.

edit :
Now I have called the xfce4-settings-editor.

I chose xfce-settings-manager on the right

There was shown window height and window-width.

I marked both and clicked on reset.

After that, the opening of the window was normal again (4 icon columns)
and the values are on my system: window-height: 500 window-width: 640

[MrEen]

Indeed. I hadn't gone wide enough in my testing. Definitely looks like a bug somewhere.

This will quickly restore the width in the terminal with the settings window closed:

Code: Select all

xfconf-query -c xfce4-settings-manager -p /last/window-width -s 640

[secureIT]

Its indeed a bug.

Tested now with LM 19.3 Tricia on same machine.

There the window can be changed horizontally as normal - even after a new call ......

edit:

May be its important or not :

In 19.3 : having same machine - same icon-theme - same icon-size ... like in 20.1

[MrEen]

I'm looking through the 199 bugs reported for xfce-settings now. If there isn't a similar bug reported I'll report it.

And yes, my 19.3 install works fine. My 20.1 test was in a VM that wasn't very wide to begin with, which is why I didn't catch it the first time.

And I just noticed that in 20.1, this package now comes from Ubuntu instead of linuxmint/upstream, so I'll need to check the bugs there.

[MrEen]

Found the bug already reported at Ubuntu here, which assigns to Xfce here via the migration.

The bug has been fixed, but Ubuntu hasn't backported the fix yet, even though it's been seven months since it was patched. There are a couple of other workarounds for this mentioned at the bottom of the Xfce link.