Picom background not displaying

[lightningx10]

I am running OpenBSD with dwm and a compositor picom, and xlivebg is unable to change the background image, only working with -n or with the compositor turned off.

Is there any way of getting this to work with an external compositor? The -n flag does not actually set it as a background but just as a window that I cannot move or resize.

[jtsiomb]

I have encountered similar problems in the past when trying to run xlivebg with the xcompmgr compositor. Some other compositors I tried, notably the xfce compositor seem to work fine.

The -n option makes xlivebg create a new full screen window, marked as a "desktop window", instead of trying to draw on the root or virtual root. If the window manager treats it correctly, it should not be distinguishable from the regular desktop/root/virtual root window. If that's not the case, it means that dwm lacks support (or has incomplete support) for the EWMH protocols, and specifically for setting _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DESKTOP.

[jtsiomb]

I just checked the dwm source code, and indeed there's no reference to _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DESKTOP. The only type it seems to take into account is _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DIALOG. You should probably send a bug report/feature request to dwm about it.

Until dwm fixes this issue, your only option is to either find a different compositor that might work correctly, run without a compositor, or use a different window manager. I don't think there's anything I can do about it.

Since this is not a bug in xlivebg, and I don't intend to debug the compositors either (I never use a compositor myself, so I don't have much interest in fixing them), I'm closing the bug report.

[lightningx10]

Thank you for the leads, I'll make a patch for dwm to fix this behaviour