A month ago, I installed Linux (Debian 12) on my PC. XFCE for the DE. Chicago95 theme.
Right from the start, and for this entire time, there has been a weird bug of some kind which makes the taskbar (xfce4-panel) visually "glitch out" visually, seemingly crashing, only to then immediately respawn itself again.
This happens many times a day, but I can never predict it by doing some action. It seems to happen entirely randomly.
When it happens, it annoys me for a couple of seconds and often causes major confusion by reordering the opened window groups in the taskbar slightly.
Initially, I kept running sudo journalctl -n 100 right after it happened and scrolled down to the bottom to see if there was anything logged. There never was.
Then, the other day, somebody told me about the file ~/.xsession-errors. This file does contain some potentially relevant stuff:
(xfce4-panel:1492): libtasklist-CRITICAL **: 00:23:19.508: tasklist-widget.c:3055 (xfce_tasklist_button_enter_notify_event): expression 'XFCE_IS_TASKLIST (child->tasklist)' failed.
(xfce4-panel:1492): libtasklist-CRITICAL **: 00:23:19.516: tasklist-widget.c:3055 (xfce_tasklist_button_enter_notify_event): expression 'XFCE_IS_TASKLIST (child->tasklist)' failed.
(xfce4-panel:1492): libtasklist-CRITICAL **: 00:23:19.524: tasklist-widget.c:3055 (xfce_tasklist_button_enter_notify_event): expression 'XFCE_IS_TASKLIST (child->tasklist)' failed.
(wrapper-2.0:1545): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 00:23:20.124: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
The "CRITICAL" parts make me think that this must be xfce4-panel crashing. But why?!
I don't use a bunch of weird plugins in the taskbar/panels. I don't do anything weird or exotic. All I want is to use my GUI without constantly waiting for that "crashing and respawning" process which is slowly driving me insane.
I have asked many times on IRC but nobody knows. I have also searched a lot online but find nothing relevant.
Some possibly useful information about my system:
libxfce4panel-2.0-4/stable,now 4.18.2-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xfce4-panel/stable,now 4.18.2-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xfce4/stable,now 4.18 all [installed,automatic]
There are no further updates. I am fully up to date.
Why does it keep doing this, and what can I do about it to make it stop?
PS: Please don't tell me to use a different DE since Gnome and KDE are both worse, and Chicago95 only works with Xfce. I have already invested so much in getting everything set up for Xfce. I just want it to stop doing this.
