Applications suddenly don't allow any interaction with them

[Wise Melon]

I first noticed this issue when I was running Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 with GNOME 3.16, but even now that I have upgraded to Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18 I still experience the issue and I have noticed the presence of the issue on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 Beta 1 with GNOME 3.19 as well. The issue being that for some reason suddenly for seemingly no reason unless I interact with the top bar in terms of clicking on an option on it (e.g.: the calender or Activities Overview buttons), I am unable to click on any application, or even drag some files on the desktop, though if I go to the bottom of my screen Docky does should which is on autohide so it does allow some interaction, though interestingly not all as buttons don't change colour that normally would when I go over them when my machine is doing this funny thing.

Some have even said though that they have to completely restart gnome-shell to temporarily get rid of the problem. I also experienced the problem a lot on 3.16, but in 3.18, it is periodic in the week that I experience it and it is several times, but not as much, and not as blocking.

[Bruce Pieterse (octoquad)]

I experienced this same behaviour early. I had to do ALT+F2 from the activities menu and then r to reload the shell. Reloading the shell was the only thing I could do in order to type in windows and to move and apply focus to open applications.

[Bruce Pieterse (octoquad)]

Hi Nikita,

15.04 will be end of life at the end of January. I wanted to find out if you are still having a problem with this in wily. I don't seem to have this problem any more in wily.

[Wise Melon (wise-melon-deactivatedaccount)]

Yes, less often, but I still have it happen every so often on Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18.

[Wise Melon (wise-melon-deactivatedaccount)]

I have now also filed a bug report on this upstream: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=762193

[Wise Melon (wise-melon-deactivatedaccount)]

This issue is also present on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 Beta 1 with GNOME 3.18. I haven't tried it with 3.19 yet but I will soon and then update you on my findings.

[Wise Melon (wise-melon-deactivatedaccount)]

Ok, after upgrading Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 Beta 1 with GNOME 3.18 to GNOME 3.19 I have found that the issue is still present in the latest version of 3.19.

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

I noticed this behaviour just this morning with 16.04 and gnome-shell 3.24.1-0ubuntu, I came back after the screen had timed out to lockscreen and the desktop interaction was very sluggish to login (several seconds to respond) and then all desktop apps were locked for perhaps 30 sec to a minute

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

correction, my report was with Ubuntu 17.04 and gnomeshell 3.24.1-0u

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 1181666, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.