Hi all,
I’ve been using Ubuntu-Mate for quite some time, and this month I decided to reinstall and upgrade to 18.04. Unfortunately, I’ve been having a lot of problems; Mate Panel has been a nightmare to configure, with frequent crashing, and I can’t seem to have certain applets together at the same time; Namely Window Selector, and Global Application Menus really don’t like to cooperate with each other; putting one and then adding the other makes the first one placed crash, and soon after the whole panel becomes unresponsive, and I need to reset the panel. I’ve also had issues where the Notification area becomes unresponsive and crashes, and upon resetting the panel, crashes again. Not to mention, some Application Launcher Icons simply refuse to appear, and I need to reset the panel several times just to get everything working together… before something else inevitably breaks 15 minutes later.
On another computer that I put 18.04, I used the standard Mutiny (unity look-alike) Panel layout, and It frequently becomes unresponsive, the Dock panel applet crashes, Though upon reset and relaunch these issues typically resolve themselves.
It’s a real shame, because I really like the MATE desktop, and I never seemed to have issues anywhere nearly as bad as these with Ubuntu MATE 16.04. I presume this is all as a result of the recent MATE upgrade, but it’s a little frustrating, and I’m tempted to Roll back some of my machines… While I love having the latest and greatest, There comes a point where the need for stability outweighs the need for the most up-to-date. It just seems like this most recent version is extremely unstable, to the point where I question how it has made it to production with all these issues.
Or perhaps it’s just a me issue, I don’t know. I figured I would just come here to post and vent a little bit. If anybody has any ideas as to why this occurring or how to fix it, I’d love to hear it, and if anyone wants any further details on the bugs that I’ve experienced, I’m happy to elaborate however I can.