Hi,
this must sound odd, but to me most Desktop bugs do :-/
The issue:
- If I hit the meta key the usual "search app" overlay appears.
- I search for an application and start it
- the overlay does NOT disappear anymore
- the miniature images of the just started app seems fine
- without being able to leave the overlay I'm stuck unable to input into applications anymore
- Things like mouse and alt+f4 seem to work, therefore it seems to work fine but not update the screen correctly.
There are other "screen update issues" that started to occur with the above e.g. when I start firefox it only displays and later updates part of the window. Resizing the window (bigger) does not change the displayed area.
The way I can start applications in UI for now is via the run-command
on ALT+F2 entering the app directly.
## Tries to resolve so far:
- I have seen similar issues due to different themes that after upgrades fail to work well. I usually used the "Yaru" theme, but I switched back to the default theme (Adawaita) and issues remain.
- starting the overlay with a mouse click to the menu icon instead of meta key => fails as well
- I usually have a lot of screen attached, to be sure that is unrelated I undocked the laptop and restarted with just the one laptop screen -> still the same issue
- Go into lock screen and log back in - still in the hanging overlay
- go back to the last known working kernel (5.4.0-42) without any change in behavior (=seems not kernel related)
- reset the full gnome config back to pristine state and reboot. Well I can confirm that all config seems lost, but the issue still behaves the same
- Remove all packages that I considered not immediately needed (but not things of the default install, you know all those things you installed once and never needed) to ensure they have no bad influence - still bad
I attached a video of the issue down below so you can take a look.
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## Odd things that might (or not) be related:
Only read this section as "could it help me to understand the main issue above", but not as individual or grouped report of other issues into one bug.
Yesterday I had programs with text areas (gedit, gvim, ...) stuck. The text panels just didn't initialize anymore - they stayed inactive. All of such programs that I started before worked fine and I was assuming some auto-update in background might have broken things. Therefore I tried to close out my open work and reboot after a full upgrade of whatever packages were still outstanding to upgrade. But this left me with the current problem.
BTW - now such editors initialize and work fine again.
While trying to create a video of this I found another helpful hint - this really seems to affect all overlays. Usually for UI-bug-videos I use the program "screenkey" which itself does an overlay showing the keys that were pressed. That as well got stuck and I could not get back to a working desktop. So it seems this is about a general "overlays are bad" more than "the application search overlay is bad".
I thought that would be great for debugging, but I got this happening only once while the issue with the application search overlay remains.
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ProblemType: Bug
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.8
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
DisplayManager: gdm3
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-10-12 (706 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180725)
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
Package: gnome-shell 3.36.4-1ubuntu1~20.04.2
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-47.51-generic 5.4.55
RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 3.36.4-0ubuntu0.20.04.2
Tags: focal
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-47-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-04-03 (167 days ago)
UserGroups: adm cdrom dip libvirt lpadmin lxd plugdev sambashare sbuild sudo
_MarkForUpload: True
Trying hard reset of my config via:
$ mkdir -p ~/.backup-
$ gnome-tweaks
# then reset to defaults