Briefly flashing terminal window which doesn't start minimized for a split second

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1

About once a day, at a random moment, there is a brief pop-up appearance on my screen of an UXTerm window, which then disappears after a split second.

Obviously, this happens due to some sort of rendering bug somewhere. All my UXTerm instances are started minimized with the -iconic parameter. They are started roughly every minute, all day, and normally do minimize before ever being drawn.

But the problem is that for unknown reasons, it sometimes is drawn before being minimized. This is very annoying. I want to stop this if possible.

I’m somewhat sure that this only started happening when I recently switched from the open-source “MESA” GPU drivers to the closed-source NVIDIA drivers. The reason I switched is that the MESA drivers were painfully slow to the point of making using the computer basically impossible. So it’s not an option to switch back to MESA.

(But at least it doesn’t freeze my machine completely like the NVIDIA drivers did when I was using XFCE. That was really crippling. I can’t tell if this is KDE Plasma being better coded, or if they fixed this issue in an update between me switching DEs.)

Is there some way to avoid this annoying “flashing window”? And how is it possible that it happens only “occasionally”? Shouldn’t it either happen all the time or never?

At first, I thought that it only happened when I was viewing a video in fullscreen, but today, it even happened as I was browsing a normal webpage, so it seems like it can happen at any time.

Any clever workaround I could use to never have to see this?

Specs: KDE Plasma 5. X11. NVIDIA GPU drivers. All latest versions according to APT in Debian Linux.

Edit: After posting this thread, it happened several more times in a short time span. Bizarre.

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May you find the Nirvana that you are searching for.

3

What do you mean by this?

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You’re doing something. I don’t know what, because you have never let us know what it is. Obviously, XFCE was not able to do what you needed to do, so you moved to Plasma. It must be mission critical, because you have scripts firing off each minute. I can’t decide if you are trying to destroy the world or save it, but I hope you find what you need to make all of this work to your benefit.

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Do I have an obligation (or even expectation) to tell you exactly what I use my computer for in a public help forum about the desktop environment used? Why would you even want to know such irrelevant details? I bet if I had started talking about that, you’d call it off-topic. Very strange thing to say.

“Mission critical” for me, yes. What are you implying? That anything that isn’t a medical, life-supporting machine is expected to be in a perpetually broken state and it’s weird to ask for help about it?

Also, “firing off scripts every minute” is not something unusual or weird.

Yeah, it was not able to function without constantly freezing and crashing the taskbar. It’s frankly garbage. I did nothing unusual whatsoever.

Save it. But this has nothing to do with that. I’m asking about KDE Plasma and related DE issues on this forum – nothing else. Your responses are bizarre.

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I was just being silly, but that went over your head. At least we can all sleep well knowing that you are indeed saving the world.

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Perhaps “being silly” (= wasting time and energy for no reason) isn’t the most helpful in a help forum?

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You are certainly right. There is no place here for humor. We’ll be having no more of it. May you find whatever it is that you need to make your system perfect for you.

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9

Based on your description, it sounds like a driver bug. I don’t think there’s anything we can do in KDE code here.

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If it is indeed a driver bug as @ngraham wrote, and you do use Debian 12 with Nvidia driver version 5.25.x (you did not specify this), you could try to install a newer driver version (5.35.x) that you can download directly from Nvidia’s website.
(There you can also find out which driver version supports your Nvidia card.)
But uninstall the distribution’s Nvidia driver first.
And make a backup, it might go wrong…

At present there is no newer driver version available for Debian stable (12), not even in the Debian Backports.

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Sorry in advance, but I feel a little compelled to mention one more time that things like Nvidia drivers + KDE, which benefit from rapid development that’s happening, might not be the best fit with the Debian project’s mission for the Stable release.

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Well, I believe I’ve been able to work around it, at least, by adding an artificial “micro-sleep” of a random number of microseconds before each script launches. This apparently was enough for it to not trigger this visual glitch because the windows are now created not at the very same time (but has no practical downside). At least I haven’t seen this happen for a number of days now.

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Have you ever heard the statement “Don’t feed the troll”?

But at least it’s funny to watch two kids arguing about nothing :slight_smile:

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Huh? What are you talking about?

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He’s just calling me a troll.

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Now that a workaround has been found, I think it’s time to let this thread retire in peace.

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