I can confirm this bug too, which happens very often only when I use VMWare Workstation (and a Windows guest with vmware-tools, as far as I can tell).
I now use the Nouveau driver.
Most of time, I switch to a TTY and reload gnome-shell with : $ killall -1 gnome-shell
But sometimes, it is either too unstable or gnome-shell crashes. I restart it : $ gnome-shell -d :0
Note that when I use the Nvidia proprietary driver, the TTY also hangs and in such a case I have no other choice than unproperly reboot the computer.
I can confirm this bug too, which happens very often only when I use VMWare Workstation (and a Windows guest with vmware-tools, as far as I can tell).
I now use the Nouveau driver.
Most of time, I switch to a TTY and reload gnome-shell with :
$ killall -1 gnome-shell
But sometimes, it is either too unstable or gnome-shell crashes.
I restart it :
$ gnome-shell -d :0
Note that when I use the Nvidia proprietary driver, the TTY also hangs and in such a case I have no other choice than unproperly reboot the computer.