Xfce Forum

lolonline

Member

Registered: 2026-03-26

Posts: 1

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Panel randomly disappears after login on XFCE (sometimes comes back, s

Hi everyone,

I’ve been running XFCE for a while now (on Xubuntu 22.04), and recently I’ve run into a really frustrating issue that I can’t seem to pin down.

Basically, after I log in, my panel (the one at the bottom with the whisker menu, taskbar, system tray, etc.) sometimes just doesn’t show up at all. The desktop loads fine otherwise — wallpaper is there, I can right-click, open apps via terminal (I usually hit Alt+F2 or switch to TTY), but the panel is completely missing.

What’s weird is that it’s inconsistent:

Sometimes it loads normally
Sometimes it appears after ~10–15 seconds delay
Other times it never shows up unless I manually restart it

Things I’ve tried so far:

Running xfce4-panel --restart (this usually brings it back immediately)
Logging out and back in (not reliable)
Rebooting (same inconsistency)
Disabling a couple of autostart apps in “Session and Startup” (didn’t help)
Resetting panel config by renaming ~/.config/xfce4/panel (this worked once, but the issue came back a day later)

I also noticed that when the panel doesn’t appear, running xfce4-panel manually from terminal doesn’t throw any obvious errors — it just starts normally and the panel shows up.

A few extra details that might help:

Using LightDM
Compositor is enabled (default XFCE compositor)
I recently installed some plugins (weather plugin and a system load monitor), but I’m not 100% sure the timing lines up
System is fully updated as of this week

I’m starting to wonder if this is some kind of race condition during startup, or maybe something crashing silently?

Has anyone seen something like this before, or knows where I should be looking (logs, configs, etc.) to debug it properly?

eriefisher

Wanderer

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 957

Re: Panel randomly disappears after login on XFCE (sometimes comes back, s

You could have a look at /home/user/.xsession-errors or .xsession-errors.old for issues.

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But it's all right, when you're all in pain and you feel the rain come down
It's alright, when you find your way, then you see it disappear
It's alright....
Chris Cornell