restart twin if crashed

seb3773 · 2026-02-05 23:27

Little trick if it can help:

While experimenting with twin and different tries with deco & style plugins, after tempting fate long enough I ended up completely crashing my graphical session (very rare though it must be said, TDE is clearly one of the most stable DEs I've been able to try) and so the window manager was broken, no way to click on anything, alt+TAB not working, everything was like "frozen".... Additional problem: a TON of stuff in progress not saved and a "brutal" reset would make me lose everything that wasn't saved... What to do?

Well it's possible to restart the window manager of the broken Trinity session from another text console: (ctrl+alt+F1 or F2 or F3... to open another session in "pure terminal" mode):

From the console of the new session in terminal mode, log with the same user (it's also normally possible via ssh with the same user):

DISPLAY=:0 twin --replace &

This replaces the current window manager on display :0 without cutting the X server, you can go back to the "normal" graphical session with ctrl+alt+F7 and you're saved, normally everything's back up (it worked for me, phew ^^ )

** You can also restart the whole Trinity display, from this terminal session:

systemctl restart tdm.service

Warning: it cuts the current graphical session (and thus loss of unsaved elements...), but it's less "dirty" than a brutal shutdown with the power button ^^

bin · 2026-02-06 07:56

Contrary to your experience I have found twin - in recent iterations - to be remarkably fragile.
This is very useful stuff so thank you for posting it.

q4osteam · 2026-02-06 09:38

bin wrote:

I have found twin - in recent iterations - to be remarkably fragile.

That’s not been our experience. We consider Twin to be one of the toughest components of the Trinity desktop. Could you specify the cases in which Twin crashes or behaves unstable ?

seb3773 · 2026-02-06 12:38

q4osteam wrote:

We consider Twin to be one of the toughest components of the Trinity desktop

I second this, even with more than 100 days of uptime, a LOT of programs launched, 2 different graphical sessions, and LOTS of hazardous experiments, I only experimented 2 crashes since I'm using Trinity. So, I'm curious about how (what conditions/usage) you experiment frequent crashes with twin (I believe you, I'm just curious about how this can happen, like I said it seems to be very rare, at least with my experience).

theasmitkid · 2026-02-06 14:53

I agree, I had used twin for a long time and it was very rare that twin crashes, and it was also only when I was tinkering with theming or other tde system modules.

I used to use win+r to open the run prompt equivalent and type "twin" and press enter. Which restarts twin

bin · 2026-02-06 17:58

Most of the issues I have centre around transitioning in and out of Virtualbox machines, that's apart from the nightmare of a wine prog vanishing as soon as you move the window - though still giving menus or whatever if clicking where the prog should be. Swapping out to SDDM doesn't make a difference. Used to be rock stable till about 3 years ago.
Not hugely bothered as I'm running with a minimal xfce install as well and the windows prog works perfectly under xfwm4 window manager. I have tried to find a way to substitute twin for it, which does work with MATE but alas haven't found a way with TDE.

q4osteam · 2026-02-06 18:39

@bin
That doesn't look to be any kind of Twin stability issue. Please specify steps how to reproduce the issue, we will try replicate it in order to investigate.

theasmitkid · 2026-02-07 02:21

bin wrote:

Most of the issues I have centre around transitioning in and out of Virtualbox machines, that's apart from the nightmare of a wine prog vanishing as soon as you move the window - though still giving menus or whatever if clicking where the prog should be. Swapping out to SDDM doesn't make a difference. Used to be rock stable till about 3 years ago.

But fix for this has been added to the R14.1.6 milestone, see https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/g … issues/699

bin wrote:

Not hugely bothered as I'm running with a minimal xfce install as well and the windows prog works perfectly under xfwm4 window manager. I have tried to find a way to substitute twin for it, which does work with MATE but alas haven't found a way with TDE.

It is possible to use xfwm4 instead of twin as the wm, it's somewhere in the appearance settings I think, can't remember.. but I feel like mixing the two isn't that great of an idea, a minimal xfce DE works pretty well for me aswell

bin · 2026-02-07 07:59

q4osteam wrote:

@bin
That doesn't look to be any kind of Twin stability issue. Please specify steps how to reproduce the issue, we will try replicate it in order to investigate.

Thanks for that - the difficulty is that once it has happened initially the VM locks, then the whole OS.
It normally starts with just the active window in the VM not responding to input via mouse or keyboard and then spreads to the other windows.
VM has 4gb, Host machine has 16gb so I don't think it's a RAM issue as such.
I will try to be more attentive as to what I have been doing to see if I can reproduce it myself before troubling you further. If it doesn't sound like twin then it may be closer to the keyboard/chair

bin · 2026-02-07 08:08

theasmitkid wrote:

bin wrote:
Most of the issues I have centre around transitioning in and out of Virtualbox machines, that's apart from the nightmare of a wine prog vanishing as soon as you move the window - though still giving menus or whatever if clicking where the prog should be. Swapping out to SDDM doesn't make a difference. Used to be rock stable till about 3 years ago.
But fix for this has been added to the R14.1.6 milestone, see https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/g … issues/699
bin wrote:
Not hugely bothered as I'm running with a minimal xfce install as well and the windows prog works perfectly under xfwm4 window manager. I have tried to find a way to substitute twin for it, which does work with MATE but alas haven't found a way with TDE.
It is possible to use xfwm4 instead of twin as the wm, it's somewhere in the appearance settings I think, can't remember.. but I feel like mixing the two isn't that great of an idea, a minimal xfce DE works pretty well for me aswell

Yes, it's in Window Decorations>Window Manager. So far I've not been able to find a way to get xfwm4 to appear there. Swapping to a different desktop just to use one programme is a right royal PITA - hence my frustration. I'm even resorting to using Showfoto in TDE instead!
I do recall seeing the discussion around the vanishing window.
Hopefully 4.16 will follow the April release pattern and make it's way to Q4OS as soon as practical.

q4osteam · 2026-02-07 10:18

bin wrote:

I have found twin - in recent iterations - to be remarkably fragile.

If Twin is indeed remarkably fragile, it should be fairly easy to reproduce the issue.

bin wrote:

.. the difficulty is that once it has happened initially the VM locks, then the whole OS.

We have not been able to reproduce that anyhow so far, and we would like to clarify the situation, as it appears to be a serious issue. We would really appreciate to get exact guest VM configuration and step-by-step instructions to trigger the problem - so we could confirm it definitely. Still it may be hardware or hardware dependent although inside virtual environment.

However, it is clearly not the same issue as the following ones:
https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/g … issues/699
https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5856
The latter, in particular, does not lock the OS completely.

It may be better to start a new topic, as this one has veered somewhat off the original post. In any case, thank you for the valuable reporting, it helps us investigate and make Q4OS better.

Q4OS Forum

#1 2026-02-05 23:27

restart twin if crashed

#2 2026-02-06 07:56

Re: restart twin if crashed

#3 2026-02-06 09:38

Re: restart twin if crashed

#4 2026-02-06 12:38

Re: restart twin if crashed

#5 2026-02-06 14:53

Re: restart twin if crashed

#6 2026-02-06 17:58

Re: restart twin if crashed

#7 2026-02-06 18:39

Re: restart twin if crashed

#8 2026-02-07 02:21

Re: restart twin if crashed

#9 2026-02-07 07:59

Re: restart twin if crashed

#10 2026-02-07 08:08

Re: restart twin if crashed

#11 2026-02-07 10:18

Re: restart twin if crashed

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