Hover animations of Close/Minimize/Maximize icons is erratic and sometimes lags behind the mouse

[Nicolás Abel Carbone]

Binary package hint: light-themes

The hover animations of the metacity icons on the ambiance theme is erratic. Sometimes, the icon does not "illuminates" immediately when the mouse's pointer is over it, and sometimes it stays "illuminated" when the mouse is not over it.

It is difficult to accurately describe the problem, so I attached a small ogv video showing the problem.

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 completely updated.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: light-themes 0.1.8.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.33-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 8 20:46:18 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release Candidate amd64 (20100928)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=es_AR.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: light-themes

[Nicolás Abel Carbone (nicocarbone)]

One more detail: as seen in the attached video, the problem is more evident when the window is unfocused.

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Thank you for your bug report. I see the same issue, setting the status to confirmed. I'm changing the package to the murrine engine, because it does not seem to be specific to the radiance/ambiance themes, I can reproduce it (not as consistently, though) with the DarkRoom theme for example.

[Brian Marshall (bmars)]

Why is this invalid, and why was metacity added? Can it be a metacity bug when it affects compiz window decorations?

[Brian Marshall (bmars)]

I've noticed that sometimes window titles are out of date, too. Maybe this bug doesn't affect just the window buttons, but is a bug with redrawing the whole window border.

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

@Andrea Cimitan: Please do not set the bug status to invalid without giving any reason. I've reset the status to "New". And why an upstream remote bug for metacity? Several users (including me) are seeing this issue with compiz.

[Nicolás Abel Carbone (nicocarbone)]

I have some new findings about this issue.

I updated Compiz to 0.9.2.1 using the official Unity PPA (http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/unity), and the erratic behavior of the icons is gone. Maybe the problem was on Compiz? Does it makes any sense?

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Setting the Metacity upstream task to invalid. This is a bug in Compiz, not metacity.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Natty Narwhal. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Nicolás Abel Carbone (nicocarbone)]

Thank you for addressing this issue. I agree this is a Compiz bug because, as I mentioned early, updating Compiz to 0.9.2.1 solves the problem.
I have Natty installed in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. Thanks to the 3D acceleration available in VirtualBox 4 I am able to run Natty with Unity enabled without problem.
About this bug, in the test configuration I mentioned, the behavior is different. There is not hover animation of Close/Minimize/Maximize icons at all when the windows is "unmaximized". When maximized, and when the buttons are placed in the menubar, the hover animations works well, without the erratic behavior caused by this bug.
I'll try to test Natty using a LiveCD to see if this is not a VirtualBox related problem.

[Nicolás Abel Carbone (nicocarbone)]

I tested this bug using a Natty Live USB, and everything worked perfectly. The hover animations works well with maximized and unmaximized windows (apparently the problem I mentioned in my previous post is related to the virtual machine).

I think that this bug is solved in Natty.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, I am closing it because the bug has been fixed in the latest development version of Ubuntu - Natty Narwhal. It won't be fixed in previous versions of Ubuntu because the package doesn't fit the requirements for backporting. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports for more information.