Bug (tearing?) with background resizing

Support & Help Requests
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#1

I have an Ubuntu 18.04 VM running MATE in VMware Fusion 11.5.6. No matter what I set my background style to, it does not resize properly. When I resize the window (depending on the style), it resizes the background but often glitches, resulting in an ugly "tearing" type effect. If I then resize the window again slightly, it often fixes itself, but this can take a couple of tries. I've attached images that show what I mean.

This happens regardless of the style (center, zoom, scale, stretch, span, and tile). But it does not happen with other desktop environments (such as Ubuntu 18.04 running XFCE).

Does anyone know what is going on and/or how to fix it? Thanks!

MATE Desktop with tearing
After resizing slightly

Here is a list of the packages I'm installing as part of setting up MATE:

  • mate-desktop-environment-core
  • mate-utils
  • mate-themes
  • mate-calc
  • ubuntu-artwork
  • lightdm
  • lightdm-gtk-greeter
  • magnus
  • mate-tweak
  • onboard
  • open-vm-tools-desktop
  • orca
  • pulseaudio
  • pavucontrol
  • eom
  • language-selector-gnome
  • synapse
#2

Hi :slight_smile:
I have same issue when I'm booting my laptop with only builtin screen and next, plug it to a external screen. The only way I found to fix it, is to open the window to change wallpaper and just close it.

There is a other way, via command line, to force set the same wallpaper again with gsettings but it's not nice to use.

If you run inside a VM, you can try to install qemu-guest-agent, and configure your virtual desktop from your hypervisor as vmware one. This will maybe help.

#3

I think perhaps I have narrowed it down to a problem with Marco? I attempted to install Compiz to fix it, but ran into a whole bunch of other problems as a result, so the outcome is, as yet, unclear. I don't understand what qemu-guest-agent will do though? I'm not using qemu.

#4

I got Compiz working, and the problem is similar. Rather than tiling the background in some weird way, the parts that are "tearing" are just not redrawing. If you drag a window over them, it leaves a trail of old window renders. But regardless, the underlying problem persists: resizing the VM window causes bad behavior.

#5

Yes you have exactly the same than me :slight_smile:

qemu-guest-agent will let know the system that it is a VM and will be more sensitive about those changes (screen size changes if the console window got resized) Try it, maybe it will help.

#6

I tried. I installed qemu-guest-agent, but I didn't understand what you meant by "configure your virtual desktop from your hypervisor as vmware one" and didn't turn up anything helpful through searching. Can you elaborate? Just installing qemu-guest-agent didn't change anything.

#7

I don't use virtualbox and have never used it, but inside proxmox settings (also virtualisation) I have something like this for the display of the VM :
image
and this the hypervisor to communicate with the qemu tools :

image
image817×469 44.2 KB

This allow the VM to be aware of the screen size changes and refresh the screen that is solving the issue on this machine. I'm really not sure that virtualbox uses qemu.