Ubuntu
mutter package

  1. Bug #1879968
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 1879968

Revision history for this message
Adam Dingle (adam-yorba) wrote : copy/paste still sometimes fails in LibreOffice on Ubuntu 20.04

In Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 there was a bug that caused copy and paste operations to fail pretty often: the text that was pasted was not the text that was just copied. See the long discussion at bug #1852183. The bug was recently marked closed, since the package mutter - 3.36.2-1ubuntu1~20.04.1 landed in focal-updates and makes the bug occur much less frequently.

Unfortunately the bug still exists, and is not difficult to reproduce. I am running Ubuntu 20.04 and have the new 3.36.2-1ubuntu1~20.04.1 version of mutter. I just opened two LibreOffice Write windows side by side, and repeatedly selected some text in the left window, copied it, then attempted to paste it into the right window. In my experiment, approximately 1 in every 20 paste operations failed: it did not paste the text that was just copied, but instead the text that was copied before that.

Now, an error rate of 1 in 20 may not seem so bad. On the other hand, if you spend all day writing a document and copy and paste dozens of times during the day, then you may hit this bug multiple times per day (as I have been recently), which is a significant annoyance.

I tested in LibreOffice since that is where I have seen the bug most often, but I have also seen it occur in other applications as well.