Non-intuitive behaviour of MATE Panel on low screen resolutions and with long applications lists in UM 18.04+

Development Discussion
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#1

I have accidentally changed the resolution of my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS VM to extremely minimal value and discovered two bugs related to MATE Panel:

  1. 1814421 - Menus on MATE Panel do not have up and down scroll buttons on low screen resolutions or with long lists

    Here you can compare two behaviors - correct from 16.04 LTS

    1604-top

    with wrong from 18.04 LTS

    1804-top

    There are no scroll buttons on 18.04 LTS, this lowers user-friendless of the top menu.

  2. 1814422 - Window List menus on MATE Panel do not have up and down scroll buttons on low screen resolutions or with long lists

    Here you can compare two behaviors - correct from 16.04 LTS

    1604-down

    with wrong from 18.04 LTS

    1804-down

    There are no scroll buttons on 18.04 LTS, this lowers user-friendless of the down menu.

For me it seems that the problem is mostly caused by migration to GTK3.
These problems are also exist in modern Ubuntu releases - 18.10 and upcoming 19.04.

Could you please restore Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS Panel's behavior in the newest releases?

1 Like
#2

Good catch of a bug! :beetle: I'd suggest opening an issue upstream so the MATE team can review/fix:

Be sure to link to the Launchpad reports too. Thanks!

GTK2 and GTK3 are different, so it might not be as simple as "restore" but it surely will affect all distros. I suspect both reports share the same problem - the menus don't support scrolling in context menus.

#3

Thanks! I reported both as:

and

#4

Sorry for the necro, but I'm wondering if this fix is responsible for the crazy CONTEXT menu behavior I'm seeing all over 19.10 on a 720p TV.

Context menus are randomly appearing with scroll buttons on them at times: invariably in a region that isn't even close to an edge, let alone the entire height of the display. These are things like the popups for a file or Place in caja: so just 5 or 6 lines tall, but they end up in a scrolling window that's about 3 lines high.

Does that ring any bells for anyone?

I tried getting screenshots of them, but unfortunately the popup actually prevents the screenshot app from working at all (which I suppose is also a bug, but one I care much less about), via either keypress or timer, so a description is all I can do.