MX-16 MATE - Troubles, tweaks and tips

[NFT5]

As a follow on from my earlier post on the MATE weather applet (here) I thought it may be useful to have a single thread covering issues with using the MATE desktop in MX-16. I'll just add to this thread as things occur and/or I find fixes. The issues may be diverse but all related to the desktop in one way or another. Hopefully my experiences will be of some use to someone else who wants to use the MATE desktop.

So, first up. Yesterday moved a window to the right hand side of the screen, expecting it to snap to the screen edge. Didn't. Just kept going and when I dragged it back it left a trail of its image across the screen. Let go of the window and everything on the screen froze. Had to Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart. Hasn't recurred.

Later, after another restart, I lost window borders on any windows I opened and menus stopped working. This one I tracked to the compositor. I usually run without a compositor, having no need for fancy effects. However, I'd previously turned it on to get the background in the Notifications area to display properly (previously known issue).

Now there's a bit of a trap here - there are two places to turn the compositor on: Firstly using the "Windows" menu item and secondly using MATE Tweaks. I tried a number of combinations, some of which restored the window borders only until the next restart, others did not work at all. Compton worked for a while but then I got a "compositor not recognised" message. What does seem to work is to turn the compositor off in the "Windows" app, while selecting "Marco - software compositor" in MATE Tweaks. This has, so far, been stable through 24 hours and a number of restarts. Any other combination is almost guaranteed to recreate the problem.

I suspect all the above are partially graphics card related. I run a very basic GT210 card, simply because the on-board Radeon just doesn't play nice with Debian. Haven't investigated further on the basis that if it works then there's no need to fix it.

[Jerry3904]

Nice description.

I'm going to move this to MX Modified, where I think it really belongs.