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On a very fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04, it sometimes happens that when I close or minimize a window, Unity freezes. I can not interact with the panel or any application, only move the mouse around. A short time later, the notebook fans get very noisy.

When I change to a TTY and check what keeps the system busy, it's usually ibus and ibus-ui-gtk3 that use >100% CPU. RAM usage is normal. But I am not sure if that is related to my problem, because after killing ibus Unity is still frozen. Only killing Xorg helps.

I just use the system normally, web browsing, texting, programming. I have only installed few programs.

I installed all updates. I tried both, the open source and the proprietary driver for my AMD GPU (I have a Intel/AMD dual GPU). This only happens with Unity.

I've found a similar problem, but disabling ibus in settings and killing it does not solve my problem. I have used Ubuntu on this machine before and it did not behave like this.

Community
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Lesik2008
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3 Answers3

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I also recently began experiencing desktop freezes in Ubuntu 15.04 when minimizing certain application windows. The freezes always occurred in mid-animation, with Chromium and LibreOffice especially -- it seemed to occur with resource-hungry applications. I experimented with swapfile "swappiness" settings, but it didn't help. Finally, I used Unity Tweak to disable window animations: Window Manager > General > Window Animations (OFF) ...and so far, this seems to avoid the freezes. Will report here if the freezes return with animation turned off.

Follow-up: The Unity launcher worked fine for a day, then became unresponsive again after minimizing application windows, even with window animations turned off. I don't think this is a straightforward graphics bug after all. Maybe this is a development issue in Ubuntu's gradual transition from X.org to the Xmir/Mir display server. The difficulty is this (mis)behavior isn't reliably reproducible. Currently the only workaround is to Ctl-Alt-F1 to tty1, use the 'top' command to check the frozen application name (Q to exit top,) killall (repeatedly, if for Chromium-browse, until "no process found" is reported,) and then return to the Unity desktop with Ctl-Alt-F7.

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Most likely the problem is nautilus crashing as nautilus is responsible for the desktop items. Try out the following solutions if anything works out :

Try removing the nautilus config files

  rm -rf ~/.nautilus

If it doesn't work out , remove nautilus open terminal

 sudo apt-get purge nautilus-open-terminal

If nothing works, until the patch comes around, just open nautilus before minimizing the last open window. I hope this helps

xeon
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Well, I don't know if this is a universal solution but at least worked in my case. From the Ubuntu Tweak I just "enabled" the icon on the desktop and suddenly everything works!

I spent many days trying other suggested solution without success, I tried also to disable the animation effects or other things but nothing changed.

After enabling the icons on desktop the speed to minimize the windows became even faster.

Andrea
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