"focus-new-windows" setting not honored with Wayland
Affected version
Debian stable (buster), gnome-shell version 3.30.2-11deb10u1, mutter version 3.30.2-9deb10u1 .
The issue only seems to appear in Wayland.
Bug summary
Since moving to Wayland, I have a problem with launching programs which are already running. The problem applies to all programs (and I also noticed that Kupfer lost the "Go to" action - although I can't guarantee this wasn't an unrelated effect of upgrading my system), but the simplest way to reproduce is:
- in nautilus, double click a pdf file to launch evince
- leave evince open, go back to nautilus, set it full screen (Alt+F10) if it wasn't already, so that it covers evince
- double click the same pdf again
What happened with Xorg: the evince window would re-appear on top of nautilus.
What happens with Wayland: nothing.
In org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences, "focus-new-window" is set to "smart", "auto-raise" to True, "focus-mode" to "click" and "auto-raise-delay" to 1.000, like they were with Xorg (I've tried several other combinations of values, without success).
This becomes particularly annoying with gedit, as it arises even with documents which are NOT open yet (as long as there's a gedit window open with other documents). So if you launch gedit on a specific file and you are working on multiple workspaces, you have to roam all workspaces looking for the gedit window that contains your file.
I'm sorry I'm unable to test with a more up to date mutter/gnome-shell right now, but other users have reported this same bug:
https://askbot.fedoraproject.org/en/question/112121/steal-focus-not-working/