During a recent community game night I hosted, an aggravating problem cropped up on my installation of Pop!_OS 19.10. Launching CS:GO locked up my desktop. Several community members on the stream expressed having the same issue. Despite GNOME’s historical stability (at least in my recent experience) this was a game-breaking bug, but thankfully I was able to boot into Kubuntu 19.10 and get the show on the road. (KDE surprises yet again!)
technology, gaming, entertainment, let's play and people concept - angry screaming young man in ... [+]
I can’t speak to the technical issues at the root of the problem, but it revolves around Mutter, the default window manager in the GNOME 3 desktop environment. From what I’ve seen, the bug is especially prevalent in gaming sessions but could extend beyond that.
This bug affects any distribution shipping GNOME 3.34.
The good news is that folks at GNOME, Canonical and System76 are on top of the issue.
Canonical's Alan Pope temporarily switched to the MATE desktop to avoid this new GNOME bug.
Carl Richell, CEO of System76, sent me a message this morning that only reinforces why I appreciate that company: they’re nimble and they act as quickly as humanly possible. Here’s what Richell had to say: “We pushed updates to Mutter Friday morning [from the Ubuntu proposed repository] and users have reported that it resolved the issue for them. The same updates will be in Ubuntu soon as well.”
I can happily confirm that installing the latest update on my Oryx Pro running Pop!_OS 19.10 resolved the issue, so a solution is definitely headed your way.
A new Pop!_OS 19.10 update on my Oryx Pro does seem to include these fixes
I would assume the fix is already working its way upstream to benefit all Ubuntu and GNOME 3.34 desktop users.
So if you’ve switched away from any of your Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora or other favorite distros running GNOME 3.34, check back in for updates. Hopefully the issue gets resolved across the board soon.
