Have you launched the Drivers tool to see if it recommends anything?
One time I was having issues and I typed "drivers" into the Start menu, and it brought up a panel that recommended a driver update, which fixed some issues for me.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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The drivers tool shows everything as OK. Also of note, I am using an AMD GPU so I am not dealing with any NVIDIA weirdness.
Have you changed the UI scaling at all?
Thank you for your reply, no I have not.
Is this a laptop or desktop? If laptop, what brand/model and how new is it?
Just in case it's relevant, I had similar issues some years back on a new laptop, and it turned out some component in the laptop was newer than the kernel version that was included. A newer kernel (I think it was using HWE, or Hardware Enablement Kernel) sorted it out.
The issue where the window needs reloaded after some time does sound like software - specifically like a slow memory leak.
Plenty of us are using Cinnamon without that issue, but of course it could be you have some strange unlucky combination of hardware, patch version, etc.
I'm not sure b if the video thing is related. Pop-out videos come in many flavors, and most range from mildly anti-user to outright evil. So the video misbehaving could be down to the specific combination of site, site video digital rights management, how much spying they try to do while the video plays, how much of that spying Librewolf is set to block, and what day of the week it is.
Do you have any window manager extensions installed? (I know gnome has a whole extension ecosystem, but I'm but sure Cinnamon even supports Desktop extensions. If you don't remember adding anything, ignore this, it's a really long shot.)
You could try adding a second desktop environment (MATE is a popular enough 2nd choice) and see if the issues happen there, as well. You can switch desktop environments in a drop-down on the login page.
For clarification of the pop out video, I mean say you are playing a youtube video, firefox and its forks allow you to "pop-out" that video into a separate borderless always on top window. I use ublock origin for element blocking including advertising and other privacy related features.
I did think window manager extensions as I did play around with the obligatory wobbly windows and the like. But I prefer to have them turned off and have made sure they are all disabled. It was fun though.
A different DE was a consideration but I am a little nervous being new to linux of changing too much and getting myself into a situation where I do not have a GUI. I do have a means to do a system image so would probably wait until I have a recent backup and a system image before changing the DE. Ideally I'd like to fix whatever this issue is but I agree it would be a good diagnostic step.
Thank you for your help.
Wobbly windows are fun! I also turned them off for stability. I should try them again sometime.
Adding additional DEs on Debian variants (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) has always just plugged them in to my login page as a drop-down to choose between.
So I consider it pretty low risk. The main cost is disk space.
If the DE freezes up, a hard power button reboot will stop at the login page and allow choosing a different one, as long as the "automatic login" setting is turned off (and as long as I know I password).