Hello, all… I’m hoping this group can provide me some help in diagnosing a quite irritating issue that the COSMIC and KDE folks haven’t been able to help with.
I have a vanilla Fedora 42 install (obviously) running GNOME Shell 48.3, where the Alt+Tab behavior switches between open windows as expected; I’ve also installed COSMIC and Plasma environments. In neither one of those environments does Alt+Tab function properly. Just to further troubleshoot, I checked if Alt+Tab works properly in CachyOS via a liveusb and it does. I then decided to check a live Fedora Plasma environment and everything there works, too.
I don’t even know where to begin to investigate and would appreciate any help. At this point I’ve tried so many things—changing certain config files, altering minor settings, setting new global shortcuts, etc.—I can’t even remember all of them.
It works fine on my installed Fedora KDE Plasma 42. So I don’t know how to fix this issue, but my guess is that it’s an issue with Plasma, COSMIC and GNOME trying to coexist in the same install, rather than an issue in Plasma or COSMIC per se.
Thanks for that… I thought the same too, yet kept finding Alt+Tab behavior bugs filed in both COSMIC and Plasma. Despite all three being able to coexist and not interfere with one another, I’m beginning to think some random GNOME setting is “breaking” COSMIC and Plasma.
Do the three DEs share any settings? I was under the impression that they have different setttings and so should not conflict. I have noticed that in some places, the Gnome docs use “super + tab” instead of “alt + tab”. Does that work on the other DEs?
I guess you could create a new user where you only use KDE/Cosmic to begin with and see how that goes. If it all works, you can then use Gnome there to see if that breaks things? That’ll hopefully help us confirm if there’s an issue with them all co-existing (and hence perhaps in some config settings somewhere)?
They shouldn’t… When I played with different DEs back in the day, I know each would often screw up the other, but was assured that’s no longer the case. Turns out that’s wrong.
I can confirm that a fresh user, having only ever logged into the installed Plasma environment, still doesn’t have correct Alt+Tab behavior and no changing of the settings fixes that.
One possibility is that the “alt” key is being read as something else for some reason and so doesn’t trigger the alt tab behaviour? Maybe monitoring the key press would be worth doing?
I well knew what I was getting into by having multiple environments installed and am simply to trying to figure out an issue that is, as you point out, very minor.
Since COSMIC, GNOME, and Plasma aren’t supposed to be using any of the same config files, I was surprised to have run into the issue I’m having and after trying “all the things” to make them work properly without success, came for some ideas on how to troubleshoot.
As a Linux hobbyist, I often try things out; rhetorically, I wonder if it’s really that surprising to do so with desktop environments…
Both.
In theory on paper it is like you said, config files are different and in different places.
But you don’t expect the guys at Gnome, Plasma and Cosmic to test what happens when their own software is mixed with any combination of multiple other desktops and their main and secondary components.
Here we are speaking of very large and complicated projects with their own issues and one of those, Cosmic, is still in the first stages while it also needs to be compatible with GTK programs so there must be some overlapping with Gnome.
I am a sort of hobbist too but when I was a kid I was given a chemical set for children and after I tried all the suggested experiments, naturally I wanted to try things out. One day my mom came back and found the whole ceiling of the kitchen sprayed with a purple mixture after my “don’t know what I am doing experiment” resulted in a sort of explosion. You know, the games we boomers played back then.
So I would not try out things that are obviously going to end in a mess since the beginning.
I am honestly surprised the only problem is the “alt-tab” thing.
I’m curious, do other common keyboard shortcuts involving Alt work on KDE or Cosmic? E.g. Alt+F4 for closing a window or Ctrl+Alt+Fn for switching to a tty console?
As a Gen X-er, I’m drawn to trying out things “that are obviously going to end in a mess.”
COSMIC has worked hard to isolate itself from any GNOME settings it may alter after many of us reported significant changes to our GNOME installs; very responsive dev team, for sure.
I just checked my COSMIC & Plasma environments and Alt+F4 does nothing, whereas in my GNOME environment it acts as expected (closing the selected open window).
For what it’s worth, I’m running Fedora 42 with KDE and alt-tabbing has suddenly stopped working for me. I get the message “no open windows” in the switcher pop up.
I haven’t done any kind of tinkering other than installing CoolerControl, but the problem started before I installed that.
