Unpinning application icon from dock made the dock forgot some open windows

[ronikarjalainen]

Hi,

After starting up my normal applications, I looked at the dock and figured that eh, I'm not going to use Thunderbird on this computer and removed from it from its position at second left. Moments later I was shocked to see that my Chromium and VS Code windows had disappeared. I thought they had crashed. But upon investigating, I learned that the dock just had forgotten about their existence. ps shows them running well and alive, and later I learned I can even alt-tab to them. But they're completely unreachable from the dock. If I click their icon in the dock, it just opens a new window.

Closing the unreachable windows and then starting them again from dock returns them to normal working state. But naturally that's not very good if it's something you can't just close on a whim. And making a simple change to the dock shouldn't break it like this.

Attachments: screenshot showing the old, forgotten Chromium window on the right, a new Chromium window on the left, and the "All Windows" thingie from dock showing it only knows one Chromium window:

Syslog has these entries:
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278600+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: st_widget_get_theme_node called on the widget [0x5c4a3c3f5b60 Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock.bottom shrink running-dots fixed extended:insensitive "dashtodockContainer"] which is not in the stage.
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278687+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: Spurious clutter_actor_allocate called for actor 0x5c4a3c3f5b60/dashtodockContainer [Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock] which isn't a descendent of the stage!
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278742+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: message repeated 4 times: [ Spurious clutter_actor_allocate called for actor 0x5c4a3c3f5b60/dashtodockContainer [Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock] which isn't a descendent of the stage!]
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278754+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: st_widget_get_theme_node called on the widget [0x5c4a3c934140 Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock.bottom shrink running-dots fixed extended:insensitive "dashtodockContainer"] which is not in the stage.
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278800+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: Spurious clutter_actor_allocate called for actor 0x5c4a3c934140/dashtodockContainer [Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock] which isn't a descendent of the stage!
/var/log/syslog:2026-01-12T08:42:34.278853+02:00 gnome-shell[4192]: message repeated 4 times: [ Spurious clutter_actor_allocate called for actor 0x5c4a3c934140/dashtodockContainer [Gjs_ubuntu-dock_ubuntu_com_docking_DashToDock] which isn't a descendent of the stage!]

Version: 90ubuntu3
System: Linux 6.14.0-37-generic #37~24.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Nov 20 10:25:38 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux