Problem Description:
I seem to recall reading about 24.04 LTS before I upgraded to it, and one of the things noted in a review was that some applications no longer bring the windows to the front when one clicks on the title bar of a window.
Thinking that surely this would be an issue that was easily and quickly fixed, I upgraded. Sure enough, many windows won’t come forward when I select the title bar (as they did under the last LTS version).
However, it’s been quite some time, and this ability still doesn’t work and is becoming more annoying.
Is there some setting that was broken and I can just fix? I’m surprised to see not discussion about this when I searched the forums.
Has this been fixed in some later release? I currently only run LTS versions.
I can work around this by selecting the program on the side bar, but it is annoying that something that I have used for years is broken and has remained broken.
Do you remember which specific apps experience this issue or does it happen randomly? I just booted up 24.04 and can’t replicate the issue. Clicking on a title bar focuses the window.
In its settings, go to Behaviour > Window Demands Attention Focus > turn this on.
Be aware that Just Perfection has many settings, and you might want to scan through them in case there are some that you want to use or to turn off. If you change the Profile, you’ll have to change the Windows Demands Attention Focus on again.
I think the terminal windows work, but Firefox, RhythmBox, Chromium, Plex – many of the application windows don’t work. As I noted, I know I read this somewhere as being a problem with the LTS release; if not in the release notes, then in a review of the release.
I want windows to get focus when the mouse hovers in them (and this does work), but I only want them raised if I click in them. Note that it is only the title bar that is broken; if I click in the window, it raises just fine.
I’m not in front of Ubuntu at the moment; I do have some app that allows me to set additional items; I’ll follow up this post with what I have and what the settings are. The settings I want (and used to have set) are (1) give the window focus when the mouse hovers over it (2) Do NOT bring the window to the front on focus.
Until the 24.04 LTS release, every OS I’ve ever used brought windows to the foreground when clicking on the title bar.
I sometimes have the same problem as you, but only when the foreground window is a specific ancient Windows app running under WINE (via Bottles). I find that Alt+Tab does the trick, although I sometimes have to press it more than once. Another trick is to press the Super key (usually the Windows keyboard button) to show the overview.
Install Gnome Tweaks:
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks
When you run Tweaks, go to Windows > Window Focus > Focus on Hover. Turn off Raise Windows When Focused. That should do the job.
I could use Alt-Tab; I didn’t know about the Super key idea. I have been selecting the application in the side bar, which also works fine. However, I wasn’t really looking for a workaround: the review or release notes indicated that it was a problem, and I thought it would have been a relatively easy fix, since this has worked in Ubuntu Gnome in all past versions.
Yep; that’s what I have installed, and that how it is configured (I just had it up to verify the settings). There is no action for what to do when selecting the titlebar – I think everyone assumes it will always bring the window forward.
The Gnome Terminal works fine, as does the Brave web browser. But Chromium does not work. So, it’s a bit weird. I don’t know that they have in common.
I went into dconf-editor and looked around, and I didn’t see anything appropriate there, either.
I wonder if the Tweaks settings are interfering? As an experiment, you could try turning them off, and see whether or not the window still doesn’t raise when you click on it.
It could be, but when I was researching upgrading to 24.04 LTS, I read that this was a known issue with the release. I don’t think it would just be a matter of adjusting some settings.
What settings do you think it would be good to turn off?
Interesting: first of all, that does seem to fix the problem. Even more odd, when I put it back to “Focus on Hover”, existing windows all seem to work fine, but when I shut down (for example) Chromium and re-start it, it no longer works correctly. I will probably leave it on “Click to focus”; the hover is a preference, but I want the windows to work as I expect.
