(This is a bit of a Big Wall Of Text; my actual questions are boldfaced, but unfortunately the surrounding text is probably needed to make sense of them.)
I am running WSL2 under Windows 11. (WSL version 2.0.0.0, WSLg version 1.0.57, Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS installed IIRC via the Microsoft Store.) From time to time I observe the following strange behaviour. (I shall describe the way it’s behaving right now, which I can observe closely; I am fairly sure I have seem similar symptoms before but I cannot guarantee that they were exactly the same.)
Some but not all of the GUI windows I have created from WSL mostly ignore mouse actions. It happens that they are all the same application: the nvim-qt text editor. They do gain focus when clicked with the mouse but after that clicking doesn’t move the cursor, click-and-drag doesn’t select text, the scrollwheel doesn’t scroll, etc.
Further, if I have a “bad” window overlapping, and on top of, a “good” window, clicking in the region of overlap gives focus to the “good” window, positions the cursor at the clicked location, etc.
I assume (but I am ignorant so this may be all wrong) that at a handwavy level what’s happening is that Windows is aware of all these windows and somehow handles the give-this-one-focus process (presumably because that requires moving the window to the top of Windows‘s window stack), but the “bad” windows’ Linux processes are not receiving any mouse-events.
I cannot drag “bad” windows around the desktop by their title bars. (Perhaps this is evidence against the handwavy description of what might be happening in the previous paragraph.)
One of my “bad” windows is kinda half bad. I cannot drag it by its title bar. If I place a “good” window under it and click on the overlap region, the “good” window gets focus. But it responds to the scrollwheel, and if I click-and-drag then text is selected (even if there is a “good” window under where the click-and-drag begins). Butbut when I click-and-drag the text-selection happens as if the place where I am clicking-and-dragging is offset somewhat from the actual position of my mouse pointer.
Freshly created windows appear to be “good” rather than “bad”.
It’s not quite true that all the “bad” windows are older than all the “good” ones, but there is only one exception (a “bad” window newer than some “good” ones). The “half-bad” one mentioned above is the newest of the “bad” windows other than that exceptional one.
[EDITED to add:] Another thing I wouldn’t necessarily have expected: I can maximize a “bad” window via the appropriate icon in its title bar, and this turns it into a “good” window.
Is this a known issue? If so, is there a known way to stop it happening or fix it? If not, is there anything I can do to figure out what’s going on?
Working around it seems not too painful: I can close the “bad” windows and open new ones to replace them. I haven’t observed at sufficient length to tell whether if I do so some of the new windows will eventually become “bad”.
[EDITED to add:] Here’s some further weirdness that has developed in the same session; it may or may not be related — I have seen things like this before without the oddities described above — but I mention it in case if gives people more expert than me some insight into what weird state my system might have got into.
I have multiple monitors. I can no longer drag WSLg windows (even “good” ones) from the one on which they appear by default to another: when my mouse pointer crosses the edge of the monitor, it continues but the window stops moving. For some “good” windows, the far edge of the window gets cut off at the edge of the monitor I’m trying to move it from; for others, the “far” edge of the window appears on the other monitor as I would expect it to. I cannot drag the window by the portion of it that’s on the other monitor; attempts to click and drag there behave as if I were just clicking on the window.
It may be that this level of weirdness means the answer is “something in ?Weston? is just terribly confused and pretty much anything could go wrong at that point; time to boot”. But I still have a little hope that someone will tell me “ah yes, this is a known issue and fixed in a later version of WSL” or something…
