[bionic] applications start in the background instead of the foreground

[Tomislav]

I frequently see new applications windows open in the background instead of the foreground, e.g., if I click on a link in an e-mail in Thunderbird, a new browser window will open and a notification at the top of the screen will let me know that the windows has been opened, but Thunderbird remains in the foreground and the new window opens in the background.

I've been seeing this for a long time now, but I'd like to stop wrestling with the GUI shell to get to the application that I just started.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: gnome-shell 3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-126.142~18.04.1-generic 5.4.203
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-126-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.28
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sun Oct 23 11:52:17 2022
DisplayManager: gdm3
DistributionChannelDescriptor:
 # This is a distribution channel descriptor
 # For more information see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributionChannelDescriptor
 canonical-oem-somerville-xenial-amd64-20160624-2
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-05-10 (1626 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial" - Build amd64 LIVE Binary 20160624-10:47
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2020-03-04 (963 days ago)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

This problem sounds related to focus stealing prevention. That's the feature intended to put new windows in the background when the system thinks you're still busy in the foreground.

However, since you're using a 4-year old release I would first recommend trying the latest long term release (22.04.1):

  https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

because this bug is likely to have been fixed already.