My apology in advance if this is a known or duplicate issue. The xfdesktop-settings program is not correctly setting the background settings, at least for my environment. The link to the debug page is dead in the FAQ so I don't know exactly what information you are looking for here but I will try my best to explain the problem I am seeing. In the xfce settings tree under the xfce4-desktop channel the background image for my multi monitor set up are set by the following parameters: /backdrop/screen0/monitorHDMI-0/workspace0/last-image /backdrop/screen1/monitorDVI-I-0/workspace0/last-image /backdrop/screen2/monitorDVI-I-1/workspace0/last-image xfdesktop-settings want to use: /backdrop/screen0/monitor-1/workspace-1/last-image /backdrop/screen1/monitor-1/workspace-1/last-image /backdrop/screen2/monitor-1/workspace-1/last-image I have proven this by running xfconf-query in monitor mode on the xfce4-desktop channel and when I update the background with xfdesktop-settings the wrong parameters are set. Here is the output from xfconf-query when I tried to use xfdesktop-settings to change the background on two of my monitors: martin@Belgarath ~ $ xfconf-query -m -c xfce4-desktop Start monitoring channel "xfce4-desktop": set: /backdrop/screen0/monitor-1/workspace-1/last-image set: /backdrop/screen2/monitor-1/workspace-1/last-image
Update: I stopped xfconfd and manually edited ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-desktop.xml to remove the incorrect entries created by xfdesktop-settings. I then restarted xfconfd. xfdesktop-settings now, sometimes works. It appears to be completely random. Sometimes it correctly identifies my monitor and sets the correct settings other times it doesn't. When it doesn't see the correct location it will NOT set any of the backdrop-cycle options. last-image, color and image-style settings do get set, but in the wrong part of the tree.
Can you paste in the output of xfdesktop -V? This sounds like you are running code from the master branch, if so can you do a git pull and see if you are still having those issues? The new code refers to the monitors by name so the wallpaper is always applied to that monitor. You may also run into issues if the xfdesktop-settings app from 4.10 is being launched to manage xfdesktop from master or the other way around.
Fixed as part of this bug report: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10380