I'm fed up with its crashes and bog slow response (takes ~4 seconds to pop down a response when clicked), it is driving my wife nuts trying to adjust the volume of her music or stop Rythmbox from playing an mp3 message from an Email (we get these as our answering machine via Ooma Telo service, which is super convenient)
If I remove it from the panel what set of applets do I add to replace the volume control, clock, network and calander etc.?
If I reboot the system is is responsve for a while, since I use Livepatch we rarely reboot, although I'm rebooting my wife's machine frequently to keep is semi responsive -- Microsoft features creeping into Ubuntu?
I use Cairo Dock on my UM 22.04. It has all the applets you do mention and more. That is why I auto-hide upper panel and do not use it often. And you might want to have a look at My personal U/M wish list for some more detail about possible Cairo Dock setup.
You could add Indicator Applet and Clock Applet separately but it'll end up looking the same way except the ⏻ will always be to the right of the 🕪 and the day/date/time will be either to the left or right of the Indicator Applet by your choice.I highly doubt the behavior that you are currently experiencing would change though.
I have two machines with UM,one 22.04 and the other 24.04 and both have Indicator Applet Complete(1.26.0) in the panel and both work flawlessly and the drop-downs are instant.
This never happened to me when I was running Ubuntu MATE 22.04. I'm now on UM24.04.1, and also have not experienced any problems like you have described.
What setup are we looking at here, e.g. the output of inxi -SMxxxz?
If the issues are only occurring after a long period of up-time; it could be a memory leak (not that uncommon, and patches may not have made it downstream to 22.04), combined with poor swap performance. I'd check how much memory (and/or swap) is being used with htop while you're experiencing the sluggish performance.
If say, mate-panel or mate-indiciator-applet, are using a lot of memory; a mate-panel --replace & might help. If that solves the problem - you could add that to a cron job.