Experiment window moves to the background (loses focus)

[smathot]

On Ubuntu 22.04, when the client tries to connect to a slow-responding server, a "process not responding" OS dialog appears on top. When the server reconnects, the dialog disappears and the OMM experiment window loses focus / moves to background. This may reflect a more general issue where sustained blocking results in the window losing focus.

The issue should be fixed for Ubuntu, since that's what the clients are using.

[smathot]

@nclaidiere I think I figured this out, but I need your help to test because it is highly system-specific. (This also means that different operating systems require different fixes.)

The issue probably arises when a blocking operation inside OpenSesame causes the window to become unresponsive from the perspective of the operating system.

• This blocking operation can be a very slow network connection, but only if we're talking really slow, as in many seconds before a reply is sent. (Which with the performance improvements in the server shouldn't happen anymore anyway.)
• This blocking operation can also be something else, although in your case the culprit is likely always the network.
• This only affects the legacy and xpyriment backends due to technical differences in how the window is managed.
• Ubuntu (Gnome) monitors inactive windows and reacts with an '"OpenSesame" is not responding' popup with 'Force quite' and 'Wait' options.
• On your Ubuntu 22.04, the window is apparently minimized.
• On my Ubuntu 24.04, the window stays focused, but I think that's a difference between Ubuntu (or Gnome) versions.

The main solution is at the level of the window manager of the operating system. You can disable the check-alive like this:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter check-alive-timeout 0

Can you verify that this solves the issue?

[nclaidiere]

Hi, thanks, that sounds right to me, that's exactly what we see: the "force quit/wait" window. I can not test it now because the system is working fine, but I will add this to my to do list and test it when we get the window popup again. It's good to know what to do if this happens.