Gnome Shell behaving weirdly since today

Question

My Gnome Shell (version 42.9, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) started to behave weirdly this morning. As far as I can tell, the problems didn't appear yesterday.

All extensions have been deactived, and if I reactivate one, it doesn't seem to work. For example, if I activate the extension Apps Menu, no menu is shown, even though the extension is marked a activated on extensions.gnome.org/local.

Several keyboard shortcuts are not working, for example those related to window placement like Super-Cursor right etc.

If I try to restart the shell by Alt-F2 and restart, the command isn't found. The alternative command r isn't found, either. Other commands work, when I type gedit, Gedit starts up successfully.

I'm not aware of any updates, new packages etc. that could cause this.

Does anybody have an idea where I could start to poke? Thanks for all suggestions.

Answer 1

• Check whether the file systems are intact.

• Ensure that updates are OK and that the software management system is healthy. You can tell so by checking that following commands do not return any errors:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

• Test whether the issue is system wide or only happening for the current user. Make a new user and login into that newly created account. If the issue does not happen while in the new account, you know that the problem is with your user account. If it still happens then the issue is at the level of the operating system. In the latter case, do not exclude the possibility that hardware components of your computer may be failing. Even if you can repair the issue, problems can soon reappear in that case.

Based on the very limited information and lacking any specific information on what may have happened with your system, it is impossible to guess in more detail what may be wrong. In case the system is the problem, reinstalling or partially reinstalling components may solve the issue. In case the user configuration is wrong, resetting Gnome Shell configuration may help. At the very extreme, fully resetting the user account will eliminate the error.

The command restart or r to restart Gnome Shell does not work on Wayland, which is the default in Ubuntu 22.04 - there is a good chance you also are running Wayland.

Answer 2

It looks like one of the installed Gnome extensions was messed up somehow. I tried with removing all extensions, rebooting and re-installing the extensions, and that seems to have done the trick so far.