switching workspaces with shortcut sometimes freezes screen

[DuckDuckWhale]

The bottom panel with dots to show which workspace you are on when switching with ctrl+alt+arrow sometimes doesn't disappear and gets stuck in a half faded or not faded state. In that state the mouse appear stuck and the screen freezes until the super key is pressed to show overview or the workspace is switched again.

Ubuntu 22.10, gnome-shell 43.1-0ubuntu1, Wayland, Nvidia on-demand, Nvidia driver 525.60.11

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

> I discovered that this bug is only triggered in my setup
> (laptop screen + 2 external screens) when workspaces are
> set to "Dynamic workspaces" (Settings - Multitasking - Workspaces).
> When I set it to "Fixed number of workspaces" (4 in my case),
> the problem disappears.

[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6023#note_1590220]

[Gauthier Jolly (gjolly)]

I am also affected on my desktop with 2 monitors.

Ubuntu 22.10, gnome-shell 43.1-0ubuntu1, Wayland, Radeon PRO WX 2100, amdgpu

[Alex Garel (alex-garel)]

Same as Gauthier for me, I have the bug.

[marc (p4prik4)]

i installed windows list extension and that caused the problem..
oops im on fedora not ubuntu I also experience this..
But mostly i cant exit overview. so its not frozen, just stuck. i can still click things

i think i also crash when i use a workspace sorting extension.
and i think i crashed when using pixel safer and with xprop installed

[Michał Fita (michal.fita)]

I confirm freeze on workspace switch with two screens, main being the external one. In my case it's Ubuntu 23.04, there were no such problems with 22.04. The "upgrade" solve some other issues, mostly with screen energy saving, but now this annoying one happens.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The suggested workaround is:

Settings > Multitasking > Workspaces > Fixed number of workspaces

[Tim Holmes-Mitra (timhm)]

The workaround resolves the freeze for me so thanks for that.

[Loreno (marcinj10)]

The same issue is still there on Ubuntu 23.04. I just installed the system,, it's fresh.

[Paul Dooley (pilotpaul)]

Confirmed bug still present in 23.10 at the moment

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

I see the same on Jammy, like the others it is reproducible easily by hitting the meta key and exiting from there in any way (hit ESC, select anything to start, ...).
Sadly setting fixed workspaces (10) did not work around the issues for me, like it did for others.

Occasionally (seems to depend if this issue races with something else as it seems more likely if the system has more apps running and me doing more things) I also get the stuck-desktop experience out of that. Usually starting with the mouse not being able to click everything anymore and a while after with a totally stuck desktop (not even ctrl-alt-f# gets me out anymore).
That "stuckness" if it is still phase-I (mouse can't clock it all) sometimes resolves itself after a few minutes - no log entries in journal when that un-stucking happens.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Considering it impossible to work with a system hanging every few hours I debugged this over the weekend a few times, but sadly to no further insight. Eventually I've given up and re-deployed Mantic on the system trying to either "help by verifying the issue still exists" or "getting out of it".

I can confirm that, at least on my system, the issue is still reproducible right after new installation of Mantic.
The workaround of a fix number of workspaces still does not work for me.

Setups showing this:
- Laptop + 2 external monitors, intel gpu
- Laptop + 2 external monitors + 2 via displaylink, intel gpu

I intend to undock, reboot and test if it also shows on this machine without external monitors - didn't find the time yet.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

FYI: Since the signature of bug 2035016 is quite similar I checked, but I already have the mutter components on 45.0-2ubuntu1.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

FYI Undocked with just the laptop screen it does not trigger the issue.

But docking the running system to initialize all additional screens makes it trigger up again once I leave the activities screen (as described before).