Ubuntu – How to restart the window manager

window-manager

How to restart window manager so that styles (or whatever) are restored?

After doing /etc/init.d/networking stop they feel completely broken.

I have reinstalled lightdm.
I have restarted lightdm.
Nothing seems to help.

Is there a command line tool to reconfigure lightdm with?

Best Answer

You may need to restart your display manager to fix your problem.

11.04 and earlier.

sudo service gdm restart

Ubuntu 11.10 and newer.

sudo service lightdm restart

lightdm replaces gdm in Ubuntu 11.10

Ubuntu 15.04 and newer.

sudo service sddm restart

While restarting lightdm restarts the entire display manager, you may be able to resolve the issue by restarting unity or compiz (Unity is a compiz plugin).

Restarting Unity (nohup setsid unity OR nohup unity --restart on the CLI OR Alt+F2 and type unity) restarts the Unity shell.

If that doesn't work, restart compiz with nohup compiz --replace. You may need to restart unity again after restarting compiz.

Restarting lightdm restarts the entire display manager which is most likely to work but it will also close your running applications. Which you need to do depends on how broken your session is. If you can just restart Unity or Compiz, do that. If that doesn't work, restart lightdm.

The following wiki article has additional information about fixing LightDM issues:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LightDM

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – StumpWM as window manager

StumpWM is a very minimal window manager....

Stumpwm attempts to be customizable yet visually minimal. There are no window decorations, no icons, and no buttons. It does have various hooks to attach your personal customizations, and variables to tweak.

source

To install

With Software Center:

Or in Terminal:

sudo apt-get install stumpwm

Then create a sessions file:

sudo nano /usr/share/xsessions/stumpwm.desktop

Paste the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=stumpwm
TryExec=stumpwm
Name=StumpWM
Comment=Stump window manager

source

Logout and login - but choose the stump session:

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CTRL t + ? reveals the help screen.

enter image description here

Ubuntu – How to change the Xfce4 default window manager

Doing YourWindowManager --replace means xfwm4 has already started upon login and you are now stopping it to start a new window manager...that's working but there's a quicker and cleaner way as this guy explains taking kwin as his example.

XFCE starts the window manager specified in /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml or, under xubuntu, in /etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml

In this file look for the Client0_Command property and edit its value: <value type="string" value="xfwm4"/> to <value type="string" value="kwin"/> (obviously, replace "kwin" with your window manager of choice) You would need to go root. You could also copy and only edit that file in /home/user/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml if you want the changes to only affect your userspace.

Because in XFCE it is common for us to save our session while logging out, don't forget to clean your session: Settings Manager->Session and Startup->Session tab->Clear saved sessions

Now you can logout and back in.