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I may have missed something here, but after I upgraded to 21.04 I randomly get locked into "Activities/Overview" after I press Super Key. I can still open and close applications but I am not able to get back to normal desktop and end up having to log out and in again. It may be that I hit another key in addition to the Super Key thus triggering it, but I am not able to reproduce it, it happens randomly, and I am not able to get out if it without logging out.

Am I missing a key combo here and this is a feature, or is it a bug, and what could I do to prevent it from happening or how do I get out of it if/when it does?

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    Is this a remote system or just you physical desktop?
    – FedKad
    Commented May 1, 2021 at 15:08
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    I confirm. This must be a bug (and may be due to the upgrade rather than a clean install, which I also did). I run X-org, so I can recover with Alt+F2 followed by r.
    – vanadium
    Commented May 1, 2021 at 16:27
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    Same here! Do we have a bug report for this? If someone has the link, please share so we can mark ourselves as impacted.
    – Enterprise
    Commented May 1, 2021 at 17:32
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    Christian, @vanadium, (perhaps Fedon), please mark yourself as impacted by bug Unable to exit Activities Overview in Ubuntu 21.04.
    – Enterprise
    Commented May 2, 2021 at 2:06
  • Whew! So glad it was not a feature. I think I can live with it since restart of Gnome-Shell gets me back in business.
    – Christian
    Commented May 2, 2021 at 19:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This appears to be a bug in the current Ubuntu 21.04 release.

If you are using XOrg, you can restart GNOME shell.

Type AltF2, then type the r key in the "Run a Command" dialog and press Enter.

This will restart GNOME Shell, and you do not have to log out or lose your work.

To use XOrg instead of Wayland...

  1. On the GDM Login Screen, click your user name
  2. Before entering the password, click the gear icon at the bottom right of the screen
  3. Select "Ubuntu on Xorg"
  4. Type your user's password, and press Enter

To verify you are using XOrg...

  1. Open System Settings
  2. Select "About" from the left panel
  3. Confirm "Windowing System" is "X11"

The next time you log in with this user, Ubuntu will default to XOrg.

Then, if you ever get locked in the Activities Overview, simply restart GNOME Shell using the procedure above.

IMPORTANT

I've opened a bug report, Unable to exit Activities Overview in Ubuntu 21.04, for this issue against gnome-shell.

If you are impacted by this issue, it is critical that you create an account on Launchpad and mark yourself as impacted.

If the developers do not know that multiple users are affected and are looking for a fix, they will not fix this bug.

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    The bug is now fixed and should be released soon. In the meantime you can download the proposed fix. Click on your architecture under Builds and then download and install the 3 .deb files (not dbgsym).
    – Clement Cherlin
    Commented Jun 10, 2021 at 13:04
  • @ClementCherlin I have this issue in 22.04.1 LTS (in Sep 2022); just switched from (default) Wayland to xorg so that at least I can get out of the muddle without a reboot every few minutes...
    – nutty about natty
    Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 13:41

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