missing title bar for some applications

[Martin Fiedler]

Some applications are missing the titlebar in gnome-session-flashback with Metacity. Standard GNOME applications are not affected, but some that use Xlib directly, like mupdf or feh, are.

Steps to reproduce:
- Use mupdf to display any .pdf file, or use feh to display any image file.

Expected result:
- A window with a title bar appears.

Actual result:
- A window without title bar, but thicker borders, appears.
- This does not always happen; sometimes, the title bars appear just fine.
- see attached screenshot

Things I tried:
- Enabling/disabling org.gnome.metacity.compositing-manager via dconf-editor doesn't make a difference.
- In an Xlib-based program I wrote myself, I could get rid of this by doing a dummy call to XSetWMNormalHints() with BaseSize set to the window size I was using anyway and MinSize set to 1x1.

metacity:
  Installed: 1:3.18.3-1ubuntu2
  Candidate: 1:3.18.3-1ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 1:3.18.3-1ubuntu2 500
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
Description: Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (development branch)
Release: 16.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Charles Lohr (cnlohr)]

I am also having this problem. Additional notes: This happens even on the most primitive X11 applications. Even applications like the Rosetta Code X11 xlib application. This happens regardless of if you use XCreate window or XCreateSimpleWindow. Additionally, even if you change the window title, the window title in bar does not appear.

This bug does not seem to happen with Xt, Gnome, KDE and similar applications.

This bug is VERY annoying. Hopefully this helps move things along.

[Alberts Muktupāvels (muktupavels)]

3.18 is very old release, does this happens with 3.28?

Is there any way to reproduce this bug always? Bug description says that it does not happen always... :(

[Martin Fiedler (keyj-ubuntu)]

I've not seen it yet on bionic (which uses 3.28), but it's still not fixed on xenial's 3.18. Even though I encounter this quite frequently there, I couldn't find a way to reproduce it in a consistent manner.

[Alberts Muktupāvels (muktupavels)]

Good to hear that this does not happen on bionic. :) Unfortunately I have to say that this will not get fixed in 16.04, especially without steps with how to reproduce this.