Clicking the desktop causes an invisible surface to capture pointer input

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1

output

After clicking an empty area of the desktop in a KDE Plasma Wayland session, the desktop becomes unclickable, and all currently visible windowed applications also stop responding to mouse clicks. The mouse cursor itself still moves normally, and I can switch between applications using Alt+Tab, but the affected windows cannot be clicked. It seems as if an invisible or transparent window is covering the desktop and other applications, although this window does not appear in the Alt+Tab task switcher. Running xlsclients during the issue also returns no output. Pressing Meta+D to show the desktop restores mouse clicking, and I can click the desktop normally again.

Operating System: Fedora Linux 44
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.29.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.8-200.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 Ă— AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX with Radeon Graphics
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.0 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
Graphics Processor 2: AMD Radeon 610M
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name: ASUS TUF Gaming A16 FA607PV_FA607PV
System Version: 1.0

2

I have been experiencing the exact same issue intermittently.

It is almost as if there is a fully transparent maximised window open.

Temporary solution has been the following: trigger the “peek at desktop” feature to bring the desktop back to life.

Operating System: Fedora Linux 44 KDE Plasma
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.29.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.1.9-200.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 Ă— AMD Ryzen 5 5600
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

3

Hi. I encountered this issue as well. I had my monitor connected to two display outputs on my GPU (experimented with PBP mode) and it started happening after I disconnected one of them.
I was able to resolve it by doing the following:

  1. Right click on desktop > “Enter Edit Mode” > “Manage Desktop and Panels”.
  2. It had two panels listed there, one of which was associated with the disconnected output. Removing said panel resolved it for me.

My best guess is that KDE Plasma was introduced with a bug that draws the disconnected empty panel on top of the primary one. I have an additional, proper dual-monitor setup, also running Fedora Linux 44 KDE Plasma, and it seems that by default nothing happens when I right-click the desktop on the secondary display, so things might be related.

4

Thank you for this insight. I followed your resolution and it seems to have worked (for now). I will see if the issue comes back after a restart. To add: I only have one monitor connected, and have always just had one monitor connected to my PC, but there seems to have been an additional empty panel added to the top of my desktop for some reason (I definitely didn’t add it myself). Once that empty panel was removed, the issue appears to have been solved.

5

FWIW, there was a bug in XWaylandVideoBridge which is used in Fedora, that caused an invisible window to eat mouse clicks and inputs, which has then been fixed:

Maybe the panel situation had something to do with it, or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

6

The issue hasn’t recurred since the last restart, and the cause remains unidentified; hopefully, it’s resolved.

7

Thank you, very useful information! I was able to remove the “invisible layer” by ending the process for XWaylandVideoBridge. It seems like it was indeed the culprit.

8

Well, I retract my solution. The issue came back after the latest system update, now without that second panel.
Thanks for pointing out the XWaylandVideoBridge bug.