Unity DE Stops Responding When Double Clicking Launcher/Dash, Installing Software from Ubuntu Software Center, or Attempting to Drag Icons on the Launcher

[Michael Murphy]

Solution: Install the latest version of Catalyst (Currently 13.11).

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

I see that if I double click the Unity launcher the entire GUI will freeze as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sasu Liuhanen (sasu-liuhanen)]

I'm having exactly the same problem, but with GTX460 (nvidia-310 / nvidia-313-updates). The only way out is to restart lightdm.

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

The issue is still ongoing with Ubuntu 13.04 and latest AMD driver (catalyst 13.4).

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

I can't even get lightdm to properly restart anymore. Using ligthdm only causes the tty sessions to turn into graphical garbage and tty session 7 to remain stuck.

[Sasu Liuhanen (sasu-liuhanen)]

Installing new programs that (try to) create a laucher icon seem to hang the GUI as well. Just installed QtOctave using Ubuntu Software Center and the installation process caused the GUI to hang at the end of the install. The program was installed, but no launcher icon was created (an icon was created on a machine not affected by this bug). During the installation, a new icon seemed to be appearing immediately before the hang (at least something caught my eye on the laucher), but disappeared in no time leaving no trace on the hanged "still image" of the GUI.

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

Yes, that one is a major complaint of mine as well. Do not use the software center to install any packages with launchers, use the terminal instead. However, it doesn't happen if you use the software center in a different DE. It only happens in Unity. So there is some bug with compiz causing all of this.

[Sasu Liuhanen (sasu-liuhanen)]

The system itself seems to be functional even when the GUI has hanged. The mouse cursor is updated and a blind attempt to move launcher icons actually moves them as verified by their location after lightdm restart. One can also blindly type in commands to a terminal window and those commands get executed.

[Heinrich Kruger (heindsight-deactivatedaccount)]

I think the problem with installing software is a separate bug (#1070745). The fix described here seems to work: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1070745/comments/8

Double clicking the launcher doesn't seem to cause any problems for me, but attempting to drag launcher icons causes the UI to freeze. To get things back to normal, log in from a tty (ctrl+alt+f[1-6]) and run "compiz --replace".

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

You don't even have to login from a tty, you can simply hit ctrl + alt + t and blindly enter compiz --replace.

[Sasu Liuhanen (sasu-liuhanen)]

The problem disappeared after upgrading to Ubuntu 13.10.

[Michael Murphy (mmstick)]

This problem actually disappeared with Catalyst 13.6 and Catalyst 13.8 fixed all crashes while Catalyst 13.11 fixed OpenCL issues and improved performance.

[Sasu Liuhanen (sasu-liuhanen)]

Ok, that's good. However, I suffered from the very same symptoms with an nvidia display card and driver (as indicated previously) and thus have never had any Catalyst drivers installed.