Bug#1031671: gnome-shell: Some applications always lose focus

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

On Mon, 20 Feb 2023 at 09:43:13 +0100, Rainer Schwarzbach wrote:
> after the upgrade to gnome-shell version 43.3-1 last week, most applications in
> a session always lose focus while certain applications are running (on my
> machine, these focus-stealing applications are chromium, firefox and
> thunderbird), making it impossible to work in the other applications like
> gnome-terminal, gnome-text-editor, virtual machine manager etc.
> Focus cannot be re-gained by clicking inside the original application window,
> it is lost immediately again.

If you upgrade all packages from the gnome-shell source package to
43.3-1 and also upgrade all packages from the mutter source package
(most importantly libmutter-11-0) to 43.3-3 from unstable, and then log
out and back in, does that resolve this?

If yes, then I think this is another way to describe the upstream bug that
was fixed by mutter 43.3-3.

Or, if mutter 43.3-3 does not solve this for you: is there anything special
about the applications that steal focus? Were they installed with apt/dpkg,
or as Flatpak or Snap apps, or something else?

Another useful thing to try would be to install and run xterm, and
say whether it has the same focus-stealing behaviour as Firefox. It is
possible to configure Firefox to use either X11 or native Wayland, the
bug fixed in 43.3-3 was specific to X11 apps, and xterm is definitely
only an X11 app, so if the bug you are seeing is something related to X11,
using xterm as your test-case would give more reliable steps to reproduce
the bug.

I use Firefox myself and I do not see this symptom: focus transfers
between Firefox and gnome-terminal the way I would expect it to. With
43.3-3, focus also transfers between xterm and gnome-terminal the way
I would expect.

> This behavior occurs since last friday (Feb. 17, 2023), I had not observed
> anything like that before.

That would be consistent with this being the bug that is fixed in mutter
43.3-3, which was a regression in mutter 43.3, first uploaded to unstable
one day before you report seeing this.

    smcv