All windows (and polybar) have very low opacity, blur doesn't always work. Restarting compton has weird results

[zjeffer]

Platform:
Arch 5.8.3-arch1-1

GPU, drivers, and screen setup:
i7 7700HQ, Nvidia GTX 1050, nvidia proprietary drivers 450.66-14, one laptop monitor, one monitor connected to HDMI, one connected to DisplayPort. Configured with xrandr. Running on bspwm.

Compton version:
git-v0.1_beta2-95-g241bbc5-2018-02-22

Compton configuration:
https://github.com/zjeffer/dotfiles/blob/master/compton/compton.conf

Started from bspwmrc, which is started from .xinitrc. X is started by LightDM.

Steps of reproduction

1. Boot bspwm with compton in bspwmrc.

Here it has a high chance that all windows including polybar will be very transparent. Even windows that aren't mentioned in the config. The cursor is fine.

2. Launch some apps like Firefox and your terminal emulator. (for me Firefox doesn't have an opacity rule, but my terminal emulator does)

3. Restart compton using either a keyboard shortcut that reruns bspwmrc or use a terminal to kill compton, then start it.

In this step, most of the time it makes some windows have very low opacity, some windows have the desired opacity described in the opacity-rules. After 1 restart, polybar has the correct opacity.

Rarely, some windows can have blur. If that's the case, all windows opened from that point forward will also have blur

When everything has low opacity, opening new apps creates windows that have normal opacity.

4. Keep restarting compton. If at least 1 window has working blur (which happens very rarely), close all apps. All apps opened from now on should have the correct configuration. Sometimes everything works (opacity rules, shadows, etc) except for the blur.

Here are two images: top is with compton, bottom is without. As you can see, Firefox is very transparent in the first image, even though it isn't in the opacity-rules in compton.conf.

Expected behavior

Windows should have the correct opacity and blur described in compton.conf.

Other details

This started happening a couple of days ago, seemingly after I reinstalled a lightdm theme. It was installed manually a long time ago but I realized I could install it using pacman.

The next day I completely reinstalled Linux and deleted everything. I used the same config files and had the same exact problem. Is there something wrong with my config file?

[tryone144]

Not entirely sure what is causing this, but I guess it is related to detect-client-opacity = true in combination with inactive-opacity / opacity-rule.
compton keeps track of some/most opacity changes in the _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY atom. This has been a problem on my system where I intentionally made background applications invisible (for i3's stacking layout). After restarting compton those windows would stay invisible.

You can check the value of said atom with xprop | grep "^_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY".

for id in $(xwininfo -tree -root | grep -e '^\s*0x' | sed -re 's/^\s*(0x[0-9a-fA-F]+)\s.*$/\1/g'); do
    xprop -frame -id $id -remove "_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY"
done

should remove the opacity atoms from all current windows. Please try if this fixes the transparent windows.

Other than that it might be also related to similar issues (yshui/picom#470, yshui/picom#471) that seem to originate from some recent dependency update on arch.
Can you try if commenting this line fixes the less-opaque windows?

[zjeffer]

Thanks for the very quick answer.

Commenting that line seems to have fixed all opacity issues.

The only problem that's left is the blurring: background blur doesn't seem to work until I restart compton a couple of times.

[tryone144]

The only problem that's left is the blurring: background blur doesn't seem to work until I restart compton a couple of times.

If this is caused by the same underlying problem, commenting out this line should fix the blur as well.

[zjeffer]

Yes! That fixed it!

Thank you very much for your help!

[gavsiu]

Can you try if commenting this line fixes the less-opaque windows?

Hey, this also "fixed" my issue. Is this it? We can't have opacity for bspwm presel anymore? Or is it like a bandaid thing for now?

[tryone144]

Hey, this also "fixed" my issue. Is this it? We can't have opacity for bspwm presel anymore? Or is it like a bandaid thing for now?

Commenting out those line is just a quickfix around a (currently unidentified) bug.
Your issue and this one seem to be a duplicate of yshui/picom#470. The linked post on the archlinux boards suspects it is due to some updated dependency, possibly related to libconfig.

I can not confirm this as I haven't updated my system yet. You can try if a simple clean rebuild of picom fixes the issue.

[gavsiu]

I'm using the Arch Linux community version of picom. I reinstalled it and it does not survive a reboot. Thanks for the temp fix though.