Missing titlebars in XFCE 4.14

Apparently there was a bug - and it is fixed in the 4.14.2 release -so the questions continue…

Hmnm - should have suggested this first - though you probably tried it…

xfwm4 --replace

Hope I didn’t lead you down a garden path…

@freebird54, sorry, I took really long. I uninstalled xfwm4, and guess what, I lost my wifi network. Network was unreachable. Is it that the network manager depends on the wm ? Probably!

Anyway, I had to go to another room, fish out an ethernet cable from somewhere, and then get the network for me to install xfwm4.

No, no luck. Still no titlebars.

However, I am able to right click in the transparent area just above the menu bar, where the title bar should be. Is it possible the title bar has gone transparent? However I cannot click the min/max buttons. I can right click, and double clicking there does maximise the window. So I would say the title bar is there!

Ok, I got the title bar back.

I kept thinking that maybe the title bar is transparent. So I went to Window Manager Tweaks, and switched off “Enable display compositing” wanting to do away with all the niceties of the compositor. That worked. The titlebar came back!

Thanks for all the prompt help!

Of course, I still have no idea what exactly had gone wrong and why the titlebar was transparent. There is no such option in the compositor section.

Yipes! I never thought of losing the wifi! Anyway - there is a setting for opacity thast may have gotten jiggered. That was what the file removal was supposed to be for, I think. Here;s an old-school alternative I can quote to you…

just restart xfwm4 (press ALT+F2, enter xfwm4 and click Ok) and save your Session on logout

No personal experience with that - but let’s try that too … ?

Also - in Window Manager Tweaks, there are a lot of settings for opacity etc - might take a look there…

How do we save session on logout?

Yes, but I thought all of those are to do with the window body, not just the title bar.

Not too sure of which are which - but under the compositor tab is where you see them -and I’d try them all at ‘Opaque’ to see if it helps

Hmmm… okay. Will try them out. Thanks for the suggestion!

Getting into a meeting now. So will check them out and post results later!

OK - good luck - I’m off to bed (6:30 am here!)

1 Like

@freebird54, you were right. “Opacity of window decorations” was set to transparent. I did not think titlebar is a window decoration, so did not pay attention. But anyway, setting that to opaque solved the problem.

The only thing to wonder at now is… how did they get that way! I doubt you set 'em up yourself. Glad you got your system going properly again - and sorry for the less bright things I had you try (I must have been even more tired than I thought!)

@freebird54, yes indeed, no idea how they got set that way.

Thanks a lot for your less bright things! They too taught me something beyond what the solution itself did.