Telegram repeatedly calls attention when Alt+Tabbing away about tdesktop

[headius]

I updated this description because the problem is trickier than I thought.

• I do not have any unread messages that I know of.
• The "Draw attention" setting is turned off.

If I Alt+Tab into the app and then immediately leave it, the notification is shown each time.

If I first interact with the app, sometimes the notification does not show up.

Notably, this only seems to happen on my system (today) when I Alt+Tab from Telegram into the IntelliJ Idea application.

A short video is provided.

telegram_notification.mp4

[ilya-fedin]

It's a GNOME bug. It should blink the icon on the taskbar.

[headius]

That may be but why does it still do this even with the "Draw attention" setting turned off? Do you have a reference to a GNOME bug I can +1 with my additional information?

[ilya-fedin]

Do you have a reference to a GNOME bug I can +1 with my additional information?

I have no idea whether it was reported to GNOME at all. People regularly create issues about that window on tdesktop bugtracker and GNOME is the only DE reacting in such way to QWindow::alert(), all other DEs and OSes blink Telegram icon in taskbar.

That may be but why does it still do this even with the "Draw attention" setting turned off?

Well, it doesn't, here's the only usage of QWindow::alert in tdesktop codebase:

tdesktop/Telegram/SourceFiles/window/notifications_manager.cpp

Line 505 in 2259f74

handle->alert(kSystemAlertDuration);

As you can see, it's called only on new notification and only when the setting is enabled.

[headius]

But as I pointed out, it is showing up with the setting turned off.

[ilya-fedin]

But as I pointed out, it is showing up with the setting turned off.

Apparently GNOME expanded its misbehavior to other calls? I don't see the blinking when notification arrives on KDE with the setting disabled what means QWindow::alert is not called and the setting is respected as intended. As this is the only call of QWindow::alert, it can't be called on Alt-Tabbing at all and indeed there's no blinking when alt-tabbing on KDE.

[headius]

Ok, thank you for the information. I can accept that tdesktop may not be the root cause, but I'm not sure how to continue investigating the issue. Normal notifications work fine, and I have disabled the "Draw attention" notification, but still get this when tabbing to some other applications. Perhaps I can try to debug tdesktop later and confirm it is not re-sending the notification.

[ilya-fedin]

I'm not sure as well. I guess some X11 socket sniffer/debugger is needed to see what is called when GNOME creates such a notification, but I don't know one.

[headius]

Appears to be a similar issue: qTox/qTox#4979

[ilya-fedin]

Apparently only GNOME/mutter developers know how to debug this as they deal with X11 daily and know when they create such a notification (Telegram doesn't create notifications with "is ready" content, it's completely on GNOME side).

[headius]

Ok, thanks. I will try to follow this up on the GNOME side.

Another related issue that was closed after the issue seemed to disappear for the reporter: #10495

[headius]

A GNOME extension to get rid of these notifications (yuck): https://github.com/nunofarruca/WindowIsReady_Remover

[ilya-fedin]

Another related issue that was closed after the issue seemed to disappear for the reporter: #10495

Well, you can find a lot of issues about that weird GNOME behavior if you dig deeper, this is something people create duplicates once in a week (+/-)

[headius]

Last comment I'll do here... this seems to be the root issue and there's several extensions to change the behavior, but it appears to be intentional and just working weirdly for some applications:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/673

I will proceed from here by offering my perspective on the GNOME issue and probably hacking around the behavior.

Thanks for the helpful input!

[ilya-fedin]

Oh, focus stealing prevention could be the cause, yeah. Qt has a very bugged window focus behavior on X11 (this even prevents diacritic characters from entering on some WMs: #1041) and has almost no support for the startup notification spec. KDE just ignores the prevented focus requests, without any notification.

[headius]

KDE just ignores the prevented focus requests, without any notification.

I just made a comment requesting that behavior on GNOME, since I honestly do not care if some window tried to grab focus without a normal notification. If some window needs my attention, they can send a normal notification!

I also made a plea for this to be fixed, since downstream developers like you should not have to deal with this. Cheers!

[ilya-fedin]

An interesting thing is that even after disabling focus stealing prevention in KDE, Telegram window doesn't focuses itself back on alt-tab as I would expect in case of focus stealing prevention being the cause. Maybe something is missing in the reproduction steps, like the window should have some view open, some custom settings or something else?

Or maybe that's even some result of Qt & GNOME bad interability...