All windows (and polybar) have very low opacity, blur doesn't always work. Restarting compton has weird results

[tryone144]

All windows (and polybar) have very low opacity, blur doesn't always work. Restarting compton has weird results

[tryone144]

Not entirely sure what is causing this, but I guess it is related to detect-client-opacity = true in combination with inactive-opacity / opacity-rule.
compton keeps track of some/most opacity changes in the _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY atom. This has been a problem on my system where I intentionally made background applications invisible (for i3's stacking layout). After restarting compton those windows would stay invisible.

You can check the value of said atom with xprop | grep "^_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY".

for id in $(xwininfo -tree -root | grep -e '^\s*0x' | sed -re 's/^\s*(0x[0-9a-fA-F]+)\s.*$/\1/g'); do
    xprop -frame -id $id -remove "_NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY"
done

should remove the opacity atoms from all current windows. Please try if this fixes the transparent windows.

Other than that it might be also related to similar issues (yshui/picom#470, yshui/picom#471) that seem to originate from some recent dependency update on arch.
Can you try if commenting this line fixes the less-opaque windows?

[tryone144]

The only problem that's left is the blurring: background blur doesn't seem to work until I restart compton a couple of times.

If this is caused by the same underlying problem, commenting out this line should fix the blur as well.

[zjeffer]

Yes! That fixed it!

Thank you very much for your help!

[zjeffer]

Thanks for the very quick answer.

Commenting that line seems to have fixed all opacity issues.

The only problem that's left is the blurring: background blur doesn't seem to work until I restart compton a couple of times.

[gavsiu]

Can you try if commenting this line fixes the less-opaque windows?

Hey, this also "fixed" my issue. Is this it? We can't have opacity for bspwm presel anymore? Or is it like a bandaid thing for now?

[tryone144]

Hey, this also "fixed" my issue. Is this it? We can't have opacity for bspwm presel anymore? Or is it like a bandaid thing for now?

Commenting out those line is just a quickfix around a (currently unidentified) bug.
Your issue and this one seem to be a duplicate of yshui/picom#470. The linked post on the archlinux boards suspects it is due to some updated dependency, possibly related to libconfig.

I can not confirm this as I haven't updated my system yet. You can try if a simple clean rebuild of picom fixes the issue.

[gavsiu]

I'm using the Arch Linux community version of picom. I reinstalled it and it does not survive a reboot. Thanks for the temp fix though.