[Solved] KDE Plasma window position issues

[mcnutty]

There have been several updates to KDE plasma recently so I'm not sure which one is the culprit (or if it is some other update e.g., nvidia-drivers), but something in the last few days appears to have broken window placement after my monitors have awoken from sleep. I've always had minor issues with Firefox windows when restoring a session after a reboot, but I've never had any issues when the monitors simply wake up from being asleep. Now however, after the monitors wake up my windows are all over the place and not in their previous locations. They are mostly within the same virtual desktop as before (but some Firefox windows appear to jump from one to another occasionally) Has anyone else experienced this?

I have 3 monitors and several virtual desktops running with the following desktop environment:
Xorg
KDE Plasma version 5.23.4
KDE Frameworks: 5.88.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
nvidia-drivers: 495.44-r2

Edit: After observing the issue several more times, it appears the window placement after waking up is not completely random. It appears to be putting all the windows somewhere on the center monitor regardless of which monitor they were on before going to sleep.

[radio_flyer]

I don't have an answer for you, only another data point. I have three 4K monitors, four virtual desktops, and the same desktop environment/versions you have, other than I'm using the amdgpu open source drivers for my AMD Radeon Pro W5500 card. I haven't seen the window placement issues you describe. When my monitors enter sleep mode, they resume with every open window where it was previously. Based on your post, the only significant difference I see between your setup and mine are the video drivers. Maybe try reverting the nvidia drivers to an earlier version and seeing if that helps?

And here's Linus' opinion (NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g

[mcnutty]

Unfortunately, rolling back to an earlier version of the nvidia-drivers didn't work. Is there an easy(ish) way to rollback KDE updates? I believe I originally installed it from plasma-meta, but equery only list the current version (no previous or no masked version).

I don't disagree about nvidia in general, but unfortunately, there's not much choice for deeplearning/ML right now.

[radio_flyer]

Unfortunately, not that I know of. KDE upgrades also typically roll in Qt upgrades, so both would have to roll back at the same time. And yeah, I feel your pain. I much prefer the open source drivers from AMD, but they're way behind nvidia in opencl and ml support. And I give Intel an A for open source effort, but their drivers tend to be buggy as hell. There is no all-around great open source video card answer at this time, presuming you can even buy one before a crypto-miner snatches it.

[mcnutty]

I haven't found a solution to this yet, but I have a few more observations.

First, the behavior seems a bit erratic. Almost every time the monitors go to sleep and then wake up again the windows of open programs are all moved to the center monitor. It appears to affect both native KDE applications and non native applications. Usually it at least keeps all the windows in the same virtual desktop, but not always. The two culprits that sometimes jump from one virtual desktop to another are Firefox windows and the System Monitor application. I'm sympathetic to the Firefox window, since it's one of many very similar windows. However, I find it strange the System Monitor app jumps desktops so frequently.

Second, it appears KDE/Plasma specific. I recently installed Cinnamon and it does not have the same problem. Unfortunately, I really don't like Cinnamon (not trying to knock it, it's just not for me), but at least for now it's a lot better than having to reposition dozens of windows every time my monitors go to sleep.

radio_flyer are you running OpenRC or systemd? I am running OpenRC and it occurred to me that maybe KDE is relying on something in systemd that is not available in the OpenRC workarounds. It's probably just a stab in the dark, but thought I'd ask.

[radio_flyer]

I'm running OpenRC also, as I'm not a big fan of the systemd philosophy. You could try taking your observations to the KDE forums to see if there's any help there. Unfortunately, I've also found them a lot less useful than the Gentoo forums in the past.

[mcnutty]

Thanks for the response. I may try over at the KDE forums at some point and update here if I make any headway.

[mcnutty]

I'm starting to feel like I'm spitting in the wind, but now I think the problem is no KDE/Plasma specific. Cinnamon was remembering my window positions pretty well (at least GTK apps) on sleep and restart. However, it was treating my three monitors as one gigantic workspace. So, after reading a few forum posts, I enabled the xinerama use flag. My understanding is that the flag is more or less being deprecated and is not used by KDE/Plasma any more, but regardless after enabling the flag Cinnamon now recognizes each monitor as its own screen. However, now I have the exact same problem with Cinnamon as I do with Plasma. When the monitors awake from sleep all the open windows get moved to the central monitor :-/

[Goverp]

Are you using wayland? It has outstanding problems with positioning new windows; one of the reasons I reverted to using X11.
_________________
Greybeard

[mcnutty]

Nope, running X11. I just tried Wayland, but I guess with the nvidia-drivers it didn't work at all for me.

[mcnutty]

Here's what I have in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory to configure the monitors:

[mcnutty]

Sorry for the long delay, but I think I finally found a workaround for the problem. Adding the following to the "Screen" section of my custom settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d appears to have done the trick: