KDE auto-shrinks windows?

Question

I have been beating my head against the wall and my Google-fu is failing me.

I tried Ubuntu 11.10 and saw Gnome 3. It's horrid. So I thought I'd give KDE4 a shot.

My only complaint after a few days of use is that when I open up gnome-terminal (I dislike konsole), the window automatically (and slowly) re-sizes down to a very small box--enough to display the title, menubar, and maybe 2 lines of text by about 20 characters.

Several other apps do this too. I've looked under and played around with Special App Settings under the system menu, but there are 50,000 settings relating to window positioning and re-sizing and none of them appear to be fixing the problem after twiddling them for 30 minutes.

Any pointers to get this window to stop re-sizing?

Answer 1

Bug 670173 - Terminal opens as 80x24, then auto-resizes to 33x24

From several bug reports I've read, it looks like a Window-Manager size/resize request issue.

The above link describes a few possible workarounds, but nothing I tried worked myself.

Evidently, when the gnome-terminal (GT) requests a particular size, the window-manager (WM) returns a slightly different size due to some need, which the GT refuses and re-requests, repeating ad-infinitum until GT reaches some minimum size (29x2?) and gives up I suppose.

Awfully cute to watch it shrink down though. But then again, I'm often easily amused.

Answer 2

Bug 670173 - Terminal opens as 80x24, then auto-resizes to 33x24

That bug talks about the same problem but with XFCE, rather than KDE.

Bug 707664 - Shrinking gnome-terminal under KDE instead provides a workaround that works for me.

Answer 3

gnome-terminal --geometry 80x10