X11 restarts sometimes on window close when running metacity window manager

[Hans-Christian Noren Egtvedt]

I am running gnome-session-flashback with metacity as window manager, and I have a three screen desktop driven by an Nvidia GPU.

Sporadic, when I close a window (can be any application gvim, chrome, claws-mail, gedit, etc.) the whole X11 server goes down instant and I am eventually back at the login UI. Extremely counter productive.

If I revert metacity and metacity-common packages back to version 3.18.3-1ubuntu2, the behavior goes away.

Only change up to latest version 3.18.3-1ubuntu3 is
  * Backport upstream change (add_window_back_to_compositor.diff) to fix windows getting hidden sometimes (LP: #1538111).

Which sounds a bit related IMHO.

I have not looked at the actual source code, both downloading the Ubuntu DEB package of version 3.18.3-1ubuntu2, or building it myself from sources works around the problem for me.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: metacity 1:3.18.3-1ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-21.37-lowlatency 4.4.6
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-21-lowlatency x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_modeset nvidia wl
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME-Flashback:Unity
Date: Mon Apr 25 09:15:25 2016
SourcePackage: metacity
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-03-30 (25 days ago)

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

This is fixed in Metacity 3.18.4, which is currently in SRU review queue.