All clients disappear after monitor power-off

[raven2cz]

After the monitor powers off and then turns back on, all applications disappear from SomeWM.
No clients are visible on any tag on any screen.

Important details:

• Applications are still running (processes are alive).

• SomeWM appears completely empty, as if all clients were moved to a non-existent output.

• There is no way to recover:

  • switching tags does nothing
  • switching screens does nothing
  • wlr-randr does not show any additional output to switch to

• The only workaround is restarting the window manager.

This seems to be triggered specifically by monitor power-off / DPMS, not by system sleep.

System behavior:

• Deep Sleep: disabled
• Sleep / Hibernate: disabled
• Only monitor power-off after ~20 minutes
• System continues running normally while the monitor is off

Reproduction is simple and reliable:

1. Let the monitor turn off due to inactivity
2. Turn the monitor back on
3. All clients are gone from SomeWM, but still running in the "background" (not visible screen)

I am aware this may be related to wlroots output handling, but I cannot rule out SomeWM itself at this point.

Hardware:

• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super

This effectively forces a full WM restart and makes unattended monitor power-off unusable.

Note on wlroots (in common, not just this issue)

I am aware that wlroots is a double-edged sword.

I have been following the discussions around it for quite some time. About a year ago, I read a long and public debate involving the Hyprland author, which eventually led to wlroots being fully removed from that project. I fully understand the frustration behind that decision: knowing exactly what is broken, needing a specific architectural change, and being unable to get critical patches upstream can feel completely blocking and unfair.

At the same time, diverging from a widely used base comes with its own long-term costs. Like it or not, wlroots has become a de facto standard in the Wayland ecosystem. Extending it incrementally, even if it requires months of discussion and negotiation, is often the only sustainable path in open source.

For years, I personally avoided wlroots-based compositors precisely because I was aware of these darker corners. However, today it is effectively the common ground, and some level of compromise and upstream discussion is unavoidable.

[jncsotk30]

+1 - I've noticed this too.

[JimmyCozza]

Are both of you using Nvidia gpus by any chance? I have only been working on amd machines for the last couple years, but my mom had my old Nvidia laptop hidden away in her garage. So I will dust it off and try to thoroughly test and run on it. Hopefully that will help me reproduce some of these issues that might be GPU related.