Game Stacking and Cursor Confinement Broken on Fedora 44 Plasma After Updates

Ask Fedora
1

I “solved” the issue with a snapper rollback. But looking for input on this issue and whether it’s ok to not take updates until a fix is in place.

The following summary is written by Claude but the steps taken and the “solution” is verified by me. Any input on further troubleshooting this issue is appreciated because there are many updates available and i don’t want to go too long without taking any updates.

Fullscreen game stacking and cursor confinement broke on Fedora 44 after the Sep 11-18 updates; a Btrfs snapshot rollback fixed it

System: Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland), NVIDIA RTX 3080, two monitors, Steam/Proton (The Division 2)

Symptoms: In fullscreen games, the taskbar (panel set to Always Visible) sometimes stayed on top of the game, and the mouse cursor could move to the second monitor even with a cursor-lock rule in place. This had worked for months.

Changes in that window:

  • KWin and plasma-workspace 6.7.4 → 6.7.5 (Sep 11), with KDE Frameworks 6.29 → 6.30
  • Kernel 7.1.x → 7.2.x
  • NVIDIA driver 610.57.04 → 615.71.09 (Sep 17)
  • Firmware updates (Sep 16)

What didn’t help: Focus stealing prevention was already on Low, and a window rule forcing it to Extreme for the game made no difference. Fedora’s repos no longer carried KWin 6.7.4 (only 6.6.4 and 6.7.5), so I couldn’t downgrade with dnf.

What fixed it: I restored a Btrfs/Snapper snapshot from just before the update, using Btrfs Assistant. This put KWin/Plasma back at 6.7.4-2, the kernel back at 7.1.13, and the NVIDIA driver back at 610.57.04. The taskbar and cursor problems disappeared.

Ruling out the driver: I then updated only the NVIDIA packages to 615.71.09 on top of the rolled-back system. The taskbar and cursor still behave, so the driver isn’t the cause.

Still open: Either KWin/Plasma 6.7.5, KDE Frameworks 6.30, or the 7.2.x kernel. KWin 6.7.5 is the most likely. A similar Wayland report (fullscreen Proton windows not raised correctly after 6.7.4 → 6.7.5, NVIDIA 610 driver) was posted on Sep 10, and one poster there fixed it by restoring KWin 6.7.4: Fullscreen windows are not raised correctly after KWin 6.7.5 update - Help - KDE Discuss

Note: As of Sep 19, a full update on Fedora still offers KWin 6.7.5, so I’m holding off on updates until a newer KWin shows up.

2

I have the same versions of kde plasma and kernel as you but on a AMD GPU and so far have not seen this issue.

Maybe nvidia GPU specific?

3

Have you also updated the kernel only to the latest (7.2.5)?
It appears you are still leaving a lot of unknowns as the cause if you do not update one segment at a time to try and identify the specific cause.

4

Yes. Updated the kernel this morning. So, now on kernel 7.2.5 and Nvidia 615.71.09. Tested with same game and the problem did not come back so it’s looking like it’s not a kernel or video driver issue.

I could go ahead and take a snapshot and then take the rest of the updates. if the problem doesn’t come back, then maybe just a one off, but… the issue would survive reboots and restarts on the game so to me it’s looking like either KWin/Plasma 6.7.5 or Frameworks 6.30. Just going by process of elimination.