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Yesterday I did a full system upgrade, and now the GUI has changed in a way that makes the system very difficult to operate.

  1. On the top bar of the windows there are no longer the close, expand, minimize buttons.
  2. I am no longer able to drag individual windows around the desktop.
  3. I an unable to resize any windows.
  4. When a new window or program is opened, it always opens in the top-left corner of the desktop.
  5. Moving my mouse cursor to the far top-left corner does not show all open windows like it used to.

I checked all the themes, windows behaviors, hot-corners, etc. etc. that I could think of and everything is set to the way it was before the upgrade.

I am at a loss. If I could figure out how to safely just downgrade to the way things were that'd be great. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I am new to these forums, and Ubuntu, but have been tinkering with Debian for six years now so any instructions given clearly will be followed to the letter. Thank you for your time. ~Ken

Addendum / machine info: The hardware is as follows -- ASUS ROG-G75VW laptop; 8GB RAM; 750GB HHD; Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M; Intel i7-3630QM processor (8 threads @ 2.40GHz) OS -- Ubuntu 13.10 'Saucy' (x86-64); Linux kernel: 3.11.0-15-generic

Note -- The machine originally came with Windows 8 pre-installed. I absolutely hated it so after careful study installed Ubuntu alongside it, which didn't last long. Eventually, I completely ditched Windows and just installed Ubuntu. The HDD is formatted LVM (can't remember why I decided to do that and now wish I hadn't) so partitioning and manipulating the existing partitions is difficult. Also, the BIOS has both EFI and SecureBoot. The machine will not boot to a harddrive unless BOTH are enabled.

user187612
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  • All these problems are caused by malfunctioning Kwin. Try reinstalling kde-window-manager package. Try setting other window decorations. – warvariuc Dec 26 '13 at 09:46
  • That didn't work. I also tried completely removing and reinstalling KDE and then tried the solutions in this thread http://askubuntu.com/questions/109530/how-do-i-restore-my-kde-desktop-to-default . I have to use Gnome, which alright, but I easily prefer the level of control I get with KDE. (p.s. -- sorry about my delay in response, I thought I'd be informed via email. I'll be more punctual.) – user187612 Jan 31 '14 at 23:48
  • Try creating a new user. See if the problem persists when you log in the new account using KDE. – warvariuc Feb 01 '14 at 07:06
  • Yeah, I knew that'd be too easy. Tried it, didn't work. Next? Btw, thank you very much for trying to help. I'm, going to update my original post with additional info on my machine. – user187612 Feb 01 '14 at 19:00
  • Try installing bumblebee to disable your NVidia card: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable then sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bumblebee. After Linux restart this will disable the discrete NVidia video card. See if this will improve the situation. – warvariuc Feb 02 '14 at 05:45
  • Ahh! Made things worse. Now it only boots to prompt. When I try to run KDM it says 'cannot connect to x server'. Tried removing bumblebee and removing/reinstalling KDM ... still only get command prompt. – user187612 Feb 03 '14 at 21:08
  • To uninstall bumblebee follow this guide. In Kubuntu 13.10 you should not have kdm 13.10 running. You should have LightDM. DO you have Ubuntu with KDE installed on top of it? How are you running KDM? Are you specifying display environment variable? – warvariuc Feb 04 '14 at 00:49
  • Okay, got the machine to use the GUI again. I've reconstructed what was done to the best of my memory. sudo su enter password apt-get --purge remove nvidia* apt-get --purge remove bumblebee apt-add-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa apt-get update apt-get install nvidia-331 Reboot sudo su enter password dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg nvidia-xconfig update-grub . There were a bunch of other dpkg-reconfigure's I did but can't remember them all. Okay, so I removed KDM and made sure LightDM was the only display manager running, rebooted the system and now have lightdm. – user187612 Feb 04 '14 at 06:14
  • And still the same problem with Kwin? – warvariuc Feb 04 '14 at 06:16
  • Yes, still the same 5 points I outlined above. Assuming the problem IS with Kwin. Is it possible something else is causing it? (after this I'll try running dpkg-reconfigure on the Kwin package) – user187612 Feb 04 '14 at 19:08
  • Okay, got more info. I was in KDE exploring the system settings and selected 'Desktop Effects'. In the first tab I changed the setting for 'Effect for desktop switching' and came back with this error: 'desktop effects are not available on this system due to the following technical issue: window manager seems not to be running'. I did more research and learned that Kwin should be using EGL instead of GLX. It's currently using GLX. Could switching to EGL fix it, and if so, how do I do that? – user187612 Feb 04 '14 at 20:45
  • Do you have kwin running (ps cax | grep kwin). Maybe you have another window manager installed and running? This could be useful. – warvariuc Feb 05 '14 at 05:18
  • No dice so far. Here's where I'm currently at: I created a new user with admin privileges and 9nstalled kubuntu-desktop lubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop on that account. I then installed Gnome MATE using the instructions found here: link Under MATE, the system is running fine and I have access to all my K programs. This is just taking a very long time and I need to focus my attention elsewhere. I'll come back to fixing KDE later, but until then let's consider this matter suspended. Sorry we didn't get it going yet. – user187612 Feb 10 '14 at 17:48

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