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Topic: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled (Read 886 times) previous topic - next topic
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Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

After doing a "sudo pacman -Suy" to update my system, now I'm getting a pop-up with this error message each time I'm logging in:

Quote
Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled until next login.

This may be related to How to remove compton thread. Other than that, everything seems to work OK: well, except that connman sometimes doesn't start - leaving me networkless until I reboot - but that's another problem...

Re: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

Reply #2 –
Compton is deprecated and was replaced by a fork called "Picom".

Picom was compatible with Compton at first but slowly went on its on way.
Executable "/usr/bin/compton" is a link to "/usr/bin/picom" and provided by package "picom" (unless you refused to replace compton with picom during some pacman update).

Over time the config options were removed or changed and might throw you an error when you try to run it.

For debugging try to run "compton" (or picom, should get rid of one warn message) within a terminal and analyse and post the output here.

There is a high chance that your problem is similar to this one: https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,3484.msg22539/topicseen.html (I overlooked you mentioned this one)

I will copy part of my solution from that thread here:
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I recommend you to copy the default picom.conf and adjust it to your needs.
You can copy one from either "/etc/xdg/picom.conf" or "/usr/share/doc/picom/picom.conf.example" to "~/.config/picom.conf".

Also check your autostart programs and replace "compton" with "picom" for future compatibility.
In the plan is to remove the "compton" symlink.

Re: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

Reply #3 –
@strajder and @SGOrava : thank you very much for your kind help! By the logs I had exactly the same error as in another "compton" thread - and running
Code: [Select]
cp /usr/share/doc/picom/picom.conf.example ~/.config/picom.conf
helped to fix it. I wonder if this solution should be included to the "compton -> picom" switch scripts (although at danger of re-writing someone's config?)

Re: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

Reply #4 –
Looking at the relevant parts of the picom PKGBUILD:
Code: [Select]
backup=(etc/xdg/picom.conf)

  # The config that comes with picom
  install -Dm644 $pkgname/picom.sample.conf "$pkgdir/etc/xdg/picom.conf"
  install -Dm644 $pkgname/picom.sample.conf "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/picom/picom.conf.example"

it seems /etc/xdg/picom.conf is intended to be the system-wide configuration file, the "backup" field means new versions won't overwrite user modified ones, but rather be added alongside with a .pacnew extension. But presumably it's not getting read for some reason so you have to copy the file to your homedir instead, and that's probably what should be fixed - whether that means picom isn't looking in the right place or the PKGBUILD is putting the file in the wrong place I don't know as I only took a quick look at the PKGBUILD and not the picom source code.  :D

Re: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

Reply #5 –
I would argue that it is looking at its default config but when started as compton (which in this case it is/was) it first looks at compton configs, or in some other way loads compton user configuration and thus reading incompatible configuration and exiting.

Re: Compton (X Compositor) crashed too many times. Its autorestart has been disabled

Reply #6 –
It is not mentioned in the manpage, but reading the source code, it can be seen that all of the following is attempted to be sourced (under the base configuration directory):
  • /picom.conf
  • /picom/picom.conf
  • /compton.conf
  • /compton/compton.conf
and a warning is issued if there is an existing configuration file with the string "compton" in its name.