Am I the only one having a Really rough transition?

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.

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What sort of hardware are you using it on

I’ll start off with the current machine I’m on;

It’s not the most amazing hardware, but It ought to run fine, without so much crashing…

Intel® Core™ i3-2370M CPU @ 2.40GHz × 4
4GB DDR3 Ram
120GB SSD

Ram is stock, haven’t gotten around to upping it yet. The SSD I put in.

I’m running 18.04 64 Bit, and am Up-To-Date with all packages as of checking 30 seconds ago.
If it matters, This is a clean install, I have not upgraded from an older version.

Here’s a Link to the OEM specs

You are right about some instabilities with the panels… It’s possible that the change from GTK2 to GTK3 has introduced several bugs that have not yet been solved. Depending the theme you choose, your mileage may vary.

The Dock applet is currently in version 0.87 but we get 0.85 from the 18.04 repos.
I installed that version following the instructions in the link that I put in the following post and it seems that many problems are solved:

Let’s hope this issues are solved ASAP.

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I’ve not noticed any panel issues using the traditional layout on two different machines. Well, other than double wifi applets occasionally. Both machines are running 18.04.1.

Hallo flan

My problems have been two fold, (a) Java 11, (b) running U-M 18.04 in a VM on top of W7 (not my choice).
(a) I use a number of JAVA -based programs and they crashed upon opening until I was able to work something out - see link.

(b) really slow, as if there was only 0.5 cpu available for the VM (cpu = 2). I’m still trying to understand that one.
So, in answer to your question, no you are not alone, although mileage varies. :slight_smile:

Edit (26.09.2018)
(b) Running my 27 inch screen, the UM guest on the W7 host powered by 5 year old intel on-board graphics was struggling. I switched to a “traditional” layout and switched-off the compositor. The result is now usable (very much so :slight_smile:). I suppose Xfce users who stumble across this post will be smiling. :wink:

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Ok that’s odd usually Intel hardware works fine, the laptop I run UM on has
worse specs than that and it runs fine, my guess is a corrupted/faulty
install unless you uninstalled something vital?

The only problem I’ve had so far, (3 days since install) is no java at all installed. I selected the default packages, didn’t try anything fancy. I’ve just done alpinejohn’s mod, so I’ll test that soon.

My main problems on 18.04 thus far have been frequent dock applet crashes. This usually happens when I am installing programs. It gets worse if I am browsing through a menu while programs are installing.

I will try to install the newer dock applet, and see if that fixes anything.

I’ve got to tell you, the issues you’re experiencing can’t be common. I’ve been running Ubuntu MATE for many years now and I’ve personally never experienced these crashes.

I hope you sort it out as it really is a great OS.

I have installed 18.04 on like 5 machines now and if anything it seems faster and more stable than old versions. I did experience mate-panel instability with GTK3, but it was on Arch where they apparently compiled it with different flags (applets are isolated differently).

I never really had many major issues with Ubuntu MATE until this most recent 18.04 Upgrade, And I really do love the operating system, but It’s a little frustrating that I go from something that didn’t have any major problems, now to something where the main interaction with the DE [MATE Panel] Is extremely unstable.

Did you upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04? That’s more likely to cause problems. Or was it a fresh install?

It was a fresh install, which is one of the reasons I’m very confused- typically fresh installs give less problems in my experiences.

This thread seems to be mostly about panel problems. I have fresh installs (now at 18.04.1) on three new machines. I also had frequent crashes using the mutiny layout.

For the moment, I have worked around by using the cupertino layout and moving the plank to the left edge. That part is stable for me.

However, the global appmenu frequently crashes on all machines. Restarting it works fine. Occasionally, a program loses its global menu, and sometimes its window border as well–this is most common on firefox. And I have one machine, used by several people, on which the log out button stops bringing up the log out screen. I have programmed a hotkey to call mate-session-save instead, which always works, even immediately after clicking on the menu has failed.

I am willing to help locate the root causes, particularly for the global menu–but I’m unfamiliar with troubleshooting procedures.

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I’ve encountered a variety of similar issues. For the MATE indicator applet and the Global Menu, compiling the latest versions from source resolved those. If you’re up to trying that, the sources are on GitHub.

Otherwise, I believe they’re updating most of those components in the upcoming 18.10 release.

Edit: Another cause for issues that I’ve seen is the fcitx input package. Removing that seemed to help a lot with stability for me .

Thanks. I am not opposed to compiling from source. For the global menu, which is the correct place on GitHub? is it https://github.com/rilian-la-te/vala-panel-appmenu

I’m on LTS, so I won’t see 18.10. I wonder if the updates will be released into the 18.04 repository, since it is a stability issue. I could certainly deal with it for another month.

What does fcitx do? Is something else required in its place?

Thanks!

Aside from stability issues, Does anybody know why a global application menu applet and a window selector applet seem to be incompatible with each other? Even If I place the Global Application Menu Applet on a separate panel altogether, It just forces the window selector applet to vanish, which is a little frustrating.

The fancy new start bar options are welcome, and I am glad to see some classic nautilus plugin features we previously lost making a reappearance 18.04 - like being able to check file hashing values under the file properties tab - but that said, I am really disappointed to see the numerous bugs and lost features resulting from the GTK3-ifing of MATE.

For example, look at the “disk utility” as it existed in Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04, vs the piece of garbage that has replaced it, and tell me you honestly think the new version is an “improvement”. The main goal seems to have been to show off nifty new Windowz like GTK3 goodies like “title-bar control widgets”, without regard to whether or not they actually improved the UI, while severely dumbing down the application. In the process we LOST 80% of the functionality, got a lot of bugs, and violated one of the “prime directives” of UI design by having dangerous controls that can cause DATA LOSS unlabeled, and exposed where the user can just click them at random without realizing the consequences (for example, by accidentally powering down a drive with that cutsie GTK3 “title bar button” - Stupid, really, really STUPID.

Sorry for the grumpy tone, but I thought the whole point of MATE was to tell the idiot lead developers who were trying to ruin the Gnome Desktop to FORK OFF, and continue with the tried and true classic Gnome 2 applications.

I’m not trying to argue that there should not be any changes, just that improvements should actually be improvements. Instead, we now seem to be jumping on the GTK3 no matter what the cost flush-classic-gnome-down-the-toilet bandwagon with dumbed down UI’s sporting a bunch of ill considered “enhancements” like silly poorly thought out “title-bar widgets” to help make MATE 18.04 look more like Windows 8 and Windows 10 (the worst pieces of GARBAGE Microsoft ever created).

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Gnome disks has been in that form for several releases, there is no real good alternative that I am aware of, the title bar “widgets” is a Gnome decision not a MATE decision, there had been an attempt to make MATE’s own disk utility, but it has been abandoned as far as I’m aware, the MATE developers are likely too busy to create such a thing currently, so unless someone from the community creates one we’ll have to remain with gnome disks for now until they have time