Touch screen largely unusable in Bionic

[Barry Klein]

In many areas of the system, touching the screen is detected as a mouse movement without registering a click.

Examples:
Caja: Icons respond to touches as clicks, lists do not.
Main Menu: Touching menu icon drops menu. Touching item in menu opens submenu. Touching item in submenu moves mouse, application does not start.
LibreOffice Writer: File menu opens with touch - touching menu items only moves mouse cursor.

Brisk Menu works without problems.

Another problem: In LibreOffice Writer - Open File menu, while open, touch close icon: Writer crashes and causes a logout.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

What touch screen do you have?

[Barry Klein (blklein)]

I have seen this on the following:
Atmel maXTouch Digitizer 03eb:8421
NextWindow 23inch Touchscreen 1926:0344

Note: the touch screen worked correctly on Ubuntu-Mate 16.04

[Barry Klein (blklein)]

Also seen on Acer Aspire R3 Series Model N15W5 using Raydium Touch System 2386:0401

The logout effect mentioned above only occurred on this Acer system.

[Linwood (linwood)]

I have this on a Z83 computer with Dell S2240T screen, and also have reproduced on a Microsoft Surface Pro (original), it can be reproduced in the Live CD version of both 18.04 Mate and 18.10 Mate (beta, daily as of 10/13), so it is not a configuration problem. The Dell S2240T worked correctly on 16.04 (did not try the Surface).

Running Ubuntu Gnome the touch works correctly on their menus (which look different of course).

One thing I notice is that a touch of a menu (e.g. on Rhythmbox's menu) when you touch the first level menu item and the drop down occurs, the underlines appear on the items just as though you pulled the menu down with the keyboard shortcut, BUT if you pull it down with a mouse click these do not appear. It makes me think that the mouse event being simulated is different than it should be and/or maybe two events of some sort. Indeed if you have a physical keyboard attached at that point and hit the corresponding key it activates (this trick will not work with OnBoard; as soon as you touch it the menu closes). Similarly you cannot use OnBoard as a workaround (e.g. Alt-E then a key) as the same thing occurs - the Alt-E works, but then the menu closes.

I have a touch screen application with no mouse/keyboard and have been unable to find any workarounds, other than going back to 16.04 (which I do not think I can do due to new hardware, but that may be my next attempt).

[Richard Riegert (xlinbsd)]

Hi, same problem here since UM 17.10 on a Atomx5-Z8300 Intel Compute Stick without Linuxium customization, pure UM install.

Monitor : Hanns-G HT231 (ID 0457:1057 Silicon Integrated Systems Corp.)
USB touch interface

Symptoms : Some essentials default panel applets like "volume" and "logout or shutdown menus" touch presses do not work and worse, kills instantly X. Screen become black with a character input blinking for some seconds before the login session appears.

Worked fine on 16.04 release.

[Linwood (linwood)]

What additional information can be provided by those affected to stop this from being "incomplete"?

[Linwood (linwood)]

Bump to keep it alive a bit longer -- is there more info that would make this "complete"?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubuntu-mate because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Barry Klein (blklein)]

This bug is described in

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/945