Ubuntu 17.10 tons of lags with mouse and window glitch

Question

I've installed Ubuntu 17.10 on my laptop without any issue, but when I am using the system everything lags and is not fluid. The mouse glitches (I am using a physical mouse and a track-pad), like it jumps, and is not fluid.

It is the same thing with the windows when I drag them or simply open any apps. The same thing is happening when I open the application page of Gnome.

I did try to change from Wayland to Xorg from the lock screen and by doing this the mouse is now working without any issue but I still have some glitch and fluidity problem everywhere.

Is this a problem with my computer or Ubuntu has an issue of some sort with Gnome on some devices and what can I do to fix this?

My laptop is an Asus Q501LA. I don't have a dedicated graphics card.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I don't think this is a Wayland only issue. After I upgraded from 17.04, I've found lag/sluggish response with gnome-shell under both Wayland and Xorg. It does seem to be a little worse under Wayland.

In my case, after a reboot, all is good for a while, but things slowly degrade and after a few hours, switching between virtual desktops or moving windows gets slower and slower. When the lock screen kicks in, after hitting a key to bring up the password prompt, there is a definite lag i.e. on a couple of occasions 15 seconds before the lockscreen wallpaper is cleared and the password prompt appears.

This is on a high spec machine i.e. 12 core i7 3Ghz with 32 Gb memory. I'm using the default oss graphics drivers (I have a nvidia gforce card, but not using the nvidia driver as it is not compatible with wayland).

I did not have these problems with 17.04 and the gnome ubuntu remix.

I've now installed MATE and seeing if that works better as the gnome-shell gets sluggish enough to be almost unusable unless I reboot every few hours.

Using journalctl to look at the logs, I see a lot of gnome-shell related errors and warnings.

All pretty disappointing. I was also unlucky enough to run into the fwupd bug related to some Logitech keyboards, so had to change my keyboard to even get 17.10 to work!

Answer 2

GNOME has a history of being incredibly laggy. I have experienced the problems you've described on Ubuntu 17.10 and could not find a fix. I would suggest either downgrading GNOME to version 3.24 or simply downgrading Ubuntu to version 17.04.

Answer 3

I found after first mouse click on the login screen, my USB mouse cursor started lagging and behaving somewhat erratically. Trackpad input works normally.. I tried the above suggestions to no avail. On another forum I saw irqpoll kernel parameter as a possible fix. It worked for me - now mouse works fine under default Ubuntu, Unity and Xfce.

Edit /etc/default/grub :

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash irqpoll"

( I normally say noquiet nosplash - I want to see the boot messages! )

Hardware:

• McBook Pro,5
• NVidia GeForce 9400M (nvidia 340 driver)
• USB Mouse

Answer 4

I have gnome extensions installed and system monitor on.

This has caused my lagging. The only fix was to change the Refresh Time in system-monitor to 50.

Answer 5

From this answer:

"Gnome/Wayland has mouse tracking issues (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032)."

Ubuntu 17.10 uses wayland by default. however, you can switch back to Xorg, without to install anything, all you need to do is:

1. Log out from you current user.

2. Under the password, near the "unlock" button, you will have something like a settings-icon.

3. Click it, and choose the second option(the one says "xorg")

4. And there you have it! the good old xorg session, with no more cursor lags!

"Switching to an Xorg session from the log in screen should solve it."

Also: Looks like GDM3 is using Wayland by default too. I also needed to disable Wayland in GDM by uncommenting the WaylandEnable=false in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf.