Hello all. I'm having a frustrating issue that started happening in the past week. Hoping someone can help troubleshoot. Randomly I'm unable to use the mouse or keyboard to navigate within windows. The Menu/Windows key brings up the Zorin menu, but existing windows such as Chrome or the Settings app don't respond to any clicks either with the mouse or keyboard. All apps are affected when this occurs.
I can navigate through windows with Alt-Tab. I can launch a terminal session with CTL-ALT-T. From the terminal session, all keys function normally. xev reports that the keys are being pressed and they are the expected scancodes.
In Chrome, for example, I can use CTRL-W to close windows, but the events don't register.
I have tried:
Deleting all dotfiles and dotdirs in home directory and recreating
External keyboard and wired mouse
Ubuntu Live CD (works, no issues)
If I kill gnome-shell it starts working again. System is fully updated as of an hour ago. If I strace gnome-shell there's a lot of logs but don't see anything that jumps out as the cause.
Any help is appreciated. I don't/can't re-install at the moment.
You can try to refresh the desktop via Alt+F2 and simply entering r at the window prompt. I'm afraid I don't know what can be the cause of the underlying problem, but hopefully this gives you a quick way of getting back up and running. Note that this will not work if you are on Wayland.
You can use the Zorin Built in Settings > Extensions manager or Gnome Tweak Tool
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks
I recommend disabling all gnome shell extensions except for the Zorin App Menu.
Test if issue occurs. If it does not- begin re-enabling extensions until it does occur, thereby narrowing down which extensions is the fault. Shortcut: Start by disabling all non-essential gnome shell extensions and test and see if you get lucky...
Thank you for the reply. When it occurs again I will try this.
I am not running Wayland at the moment, but may try switching over. I do see the Xorg process at the top of the top/btop output. Not super high, but at 6% when the system is otherwise idle.
Thank you. I will try this. gnome-tweaks was installed and I have disabled all extensions for now.
There appears to be some issue specifically with button press events. Because it's occurring with both a wired and bluetooth mouse, I was thinking it was some sort of input driver.
In syslog there are a few hundred of these messages:
Checking journalctl again, I see 150K of these "Rejected: destination has a full message queue..." errors. This laptop is also running NVidia drivers (from Zorin repos). These are coming in at 50 or so per second from what I can see.
I'm going to try rolling the drivers to Nvidia vanilla.
I'm running on a Dell XPS 15 9500, purchased in January 2021. It has 64G currently. lspci and dmidecode show the following:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9b44 (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics (rev 05)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 02)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Thermal Controller
00:13.0 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Device 06fc
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Shared SRAM
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX201
00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0
00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #1
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake HECI Controller
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 06b8 (rev f0)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 06be (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO UART Host Controller #0
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 068e
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH cAVS
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH SMBus Controller
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH SPI Controller
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1f95 (rev a1)
Processor Information
Socket Designation: CPU 1
Type: Central Processor
Family: Core i7
Manufacturer: Intel(R) Corporation
Signature: Type 0, Family 6, Model 165, Stepping 2
Drive is at about 50% capacity:
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/nvme0n1p2 916G 429G 441G 50% /
You may be onto something with wired/wireless. I've completely disconnected the mouse and been using trackpad only. After a few hours I have not seen the issue again. I had previously replaced the mouse (Logitech Pebble) with another one and the issue and it also would go into the error state. I ordered a USB wireless mouse so I can test that also.
Other notes: I re-enabled the Gnome extensions via Tweaks. Even with all of them off the issue persisted. I do like the Zorin look-and-feel and it was a pain to have the generic Gnome desktop.
Also unloaded the VMWare kmods which did not fix the issue.
Have you followed up on this idea you had earlier?
Thanks for verifying. So we know it is not an issue with Gnome Shell extensions and by that reasoning, is not likely an issue with Gnome Shell itself - rather Gnome Shell is being affected.