I have been using xfce4 and herbstluftwm (tiling window manager) for months without encountering any problems. Since xfce 4.12 I encounter major problems though. That is, everything works fine from pressing the power button until starting xfdesktop. But as soon as xfdesktop is running (bg images are shown, context menu working) the windowmanager doesn't work properly anymore. Literally no window is visible, not even the xfce4-panel. Only windows in fullscreen mode are visible but become invisible once they're not in fullscreen mode anymore. There is some terminal output just after xfdesktop is started, but it's only there for about 1/5s. I could provide it if it's useful in any way. The only workaround I've found is replacing xfdesktop with feh, which obviously only works as a temporary solution. Herbstluftwm has not been updated lately, so I doubt it's a problem with hlwm. OS: Arch Linux x86_64 Hardware: thinkpad x230t, dell inspiron n7110 (most likely not hardware-related...) WM: Herbstluftwm DE: xfce4 (+xfce4-goodies) Please feel free to contact me for further (more detailed) information like logs etc!
This bug appears to be specific to hlwm which is not able to recognize or manage the xfdesktop window properly. Therefore, I would suggest that you contact the hlwm developer and ask how to debug the window handling.
Thanks for your answer! *properly _anymore_. But yes, your assumption seems to be quite correct as upgrading to herbstluftwm-git (on AUR for arch-users) fixed the issue. OT: But regarding the fact that the handling of the image lists fundamentally changed from 4.foo to 4.12 makes me want to find some other nice desktop application. I have no idea why one would discard such a flawlessly working feature. Maybe I'm just missing something crucial to it...
This report can be closed then. I do not know why the image list feature has been removed, but this step was probably documented/discussed somewhere.