The biggest annoyance I have experienced so far is that from time to time, the Windows Manager xfwm4 crashes. It is so hard to recover from that. The crash is the result of a corrupted desktop state. Fortunately, it is recoverable. This tutorial will describe how to do it in detail.
There is no way of recovery. The only thing I found helping is to delete the corrupted session files and restart the PC.
First, I exit the current desktop window and get into the OS terminal. This can be done by pressing the following key combinations:
CTRL + ALT + (FN) F1
Note that the "FN" key is the function key. I have to use that to enable the F1 to F12 keys. Once I press this key combination, the PC will switch from the desktop UI to just the terminal (like back in the Microsoft DOS days).
Once I log in with my username and password, I can go to the ".cache/session" sub-directory under my home directory:
cd ~/.cache/session
I use the following command to delete all contents in this sub-directory:
rm -rf *
After deleting, I run the reboot command to restart the PC:
sudo reboot now
I tried this several times, but the issue was not resolved. So I took a more drastic approach. I deleted everything in the folder ".cache/". After reboot, xfwm4 is finally running correctly. Here are the commands:
cd ~/.cache/ rm -rf *
This happens every time I update the xorg-server for the desktop. I need to remember next time when the xorg-server is updated, I will need to reboot the PC immediately to avoid this type of issue.
Correction: Fixed the typo for "xserver", the proper name is "xorg-server".
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