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On a very fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04, it sometimes happens that when I close or minimize a window, Unity freezes. I can not interact with the panel or any application, only move the mouse around. A short time later, the notebook fans get very noisy.

When I change to a TTY and check what keeps the system busy, it's usually ibus and ibus-ui-gtk3 that use >100% CPU. RAM usage is normal. But I am not sure if that is related to my problem, because after killing ibus Unity is still frozen. Only killing Xorg helps.

I just use the system normally, web browsing, texting, programming. I have only installed few programs.

I installed all updates. I tried both, the open source and the proprietary driver for my AMD GPU (I have a Intel/AMD dual GPU). This only happens with Unity.

I've found a similar problem, but disabling ibus in settings and killing it does not solve my problem. I have used Ubuntu on this machine before and it did not behave like this.

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  • I'm expecting the same problem.
    – komaflash
    Jan 24, 2015 at 10:41
  • I guess I am having the same problem, mine only happens when all windows are minimized it seems though. Apr 22, 2015 at 5:38
  • I see the same on 15.04
    – beruic
    May 27, 2015 at 19:23

3 Answers 3

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I also recently began experiencing desktop freezes in Ubuntu 15.04 when minimizing certain application windows. The freezes always occurred in mid-animation, with Chromium and LibreOffice especially -- it seemed to occur with resource-hungry applications. I experimented with swapfile "swappiness" settings, but it didn't help. Finally, I used Unity Tweak to disable window animations: Window Manager > General > Window Animations (OFF) ...and so far, this seems to avoid the freezes. Will report here if the freezes return with animation turned off.

Follow-up: The Unity launcher worked fine for a day, then became unresponsive again after minimizing application windows, even with window animations turned off. I don't think this is a straightforward graphics bug after all. Maybe this is a development issue in Ubuntu's gradual transition from X.org to the Xmir/Mir display server. The difficulty is this (mis)behavior isn't reliably reproducible. Currently the only workaround is to Ctl-Alt-F1 to tty1, use the 'top' command to check the frozen application name (Q to exit top,) killall (repeatedly, if for Chromium-browse, until "no process found" is reported,) and then return to the Unity desktop with Ctl-Alt-F7.

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  • As a web search for "launcher freeze on minimize" keeps finding this page and few others, I'd like to note here that Canonical appears to finally have fixed my Unity launcher freeze symptoms with a Fri Jul 17 update. The launcher now reliably minimizes and restores full-screen application windows. I think automated crash reporting really helps!
    – user173876
    Jul 20, 2015 at 0:55
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Most likely the problem is nautilus crashing as nautilus is responsible for the desktop items. Try out the following solutions if anything works out :

Try removing the nautilus config files

  rm -rf ~/.nautilus

If it doesn't work out , remove nautilus open terminal

 sudo apt-get purge nautilus-open-terminal

If nothing works, until the patch comes around, just open nautilus before minimizing the last open window. I hope this helps

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  • The question itself does not mention nautilus at all. This issue could be happening when any window is closed, regardless of whether or not nautilus is in use, or even installed.
    – user323419
    Feb 16, 2016 at 23:33
  • Nautilus is always running and in use. That's the file manager for Ubuntu. The issue as I recall it was occurring at one point due to some mishandled exceptions in Nautilus. For a complete understanding of what Nautilus is, you can refer this doc : help.ubuntu.com/community/DefaultFileManager
    – xeon
    Jul 3, 2019 at 18:13
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Well, I don't know if this is a universal solution but at least worked in my case. From the Ubuntu Tweak I just "enabled" the icon on the desktop and suddenly everything works!

I spent many days trying other suggested solution without success, I tried also to disable the animation effects or other things but nothing changed.

After enabling the icons on desktop the speed to minimize the windows became even faster.

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