In GTK4 applications on Xorg / X11, opening menus, menubuttons, popovers, combobox or comboboxentry widgets, will grab and lock input / focus and prevent clicking or selecting on any other application
In recent days, I noticed that in GNOME 43.1 / Fedora 37, if you have any GTK4 menu, popover or other active widget "open" (ex: clicking a cell or menubutton in GNOME Calendar, or renaming a file in Nautilus), you will be unable to click and interact with any other application on the desktop (ex: unable to click tabs in Firefox). This wasn't the case before (in previous versions of GNOME).
To reproduce, with a GNOME Xorg session:
- Open gnome-calendar, gnome-terminal (with multiple tabs open), Nautilus or Firefox somewhere on the side
- Launch
gtk4-widget-factory
- Click on the widget factory's menubutton, or the "v" arrow of the first comboboxentry, or any of the comboboxes
- Try to interact with the other app you had launched (ex: selecting text or clicking a tab in Firefox or GNOME Terminal)
Result: nothing can happen until you dismiss the GTK4 widget you had begun interacting with.
This issue only gets triggered by GTK4 apps (opening a menubutton in a GTK3 app doesn't cause this input lock), and apparently only on Xorg (I wasn't able to trigger this on a Wayland session so far).