Minor glitch with occasional desktop icons lockup with Disco

[TWPonKubuntu]

Warning, this is my bleeding edge system running Kubuntu 19.04, Disco Dingo, with Kernel 4.20.8, HP Pavilion 64bit system, 1TB HD, 6GB ram.

Occasionally and not consistently, my desktop icons will be unresponsive when I boot the system. None of the icons will respond to a mouse-over or a left click to run. Right mouse click does bring up the expected tool menu and I am able to leave and reboot. Upon reboot, the desktop icons are then responsive and I can work as expected.

This is not a serious problem since a reboot "fixes" it. But I wanted to post a notice about it in case anyone else runs into this.

PS: this text editor won't accept this title:
[Disco Dingo 19.04] Minor glitch with occasional desktop icons lockup

I don't see any characters in that string which are illegal for a title...

[Snowhog]

The MOD that restricts what characters are allowed in Thread/Post titles has for some; many maybe; a confusing statement as to what is allowed.

This is what you see just below Title when starting a Thread or replying to a Post:

([a-zA-Z0-9.,'-?/ ] Characters Only)

The parens -- ( and ) -- are just to enclose the statement. The square brackets -- [ and ] -- are delimiters and not allowable characters.

When using the PCRE functions, it is required that the pattern is enclosed by delimiters. A delimiter can be any non-alphanumeric, non-backslash, non-whitespace character.

Often used delimiters are forward slashes (/), hash signs (#) and tildes (~). The following are all examples of valid delimited patterns.

/foo bar/
#^[^0-9]$#
+php+
%[a-zA-Z0-9_-]%

It is also possible to use bracket style delimiters where the opening and closing brackets are the starting and ending delimiter, respectively. (), {}, [] and <> are all valid bracket style delimiter pairs.

(this [is] a (pattern))
{this [is] a (pattern)}
[this [is] a (pattern)]
<this [is] a (pattern)>

Hope this clears that up for you.

[TWPonKubuntu]

@Snowhog, yes, thanks for the explanation, and yes, that statement is "less than clear", but I can work with this.

[TWPonKubuntu]

RE my original post and the desktop icon lockup. This appears (crossing my fingers) to have stopped happening, meaning I can login and get immediate access to all desktop icons (no reboot needed). Disco is in active development, with update batches offered several times each day, so I'm happy with it.

Cancel the above overly optimistic report. I installed the latest Linux Kernel, 4.20.11 and upon reboot the desktop icons set was locked again. Rebooted and the icons are now active. Still not fixed...

[oshunluvr]

Weird that a reboot fixes it. AFAIK, the whole point of rebooting is to reset everything back to square one. I assume logging out and back in doesn't fix it. Next time it's locked up, check top or ksysguard and see if something is eating all the resources. Almost sounds like the old "baloo is killing my desktop" issue.

[TWPonKubuntu]

oshuluver; I've not tried to logout only and then back in, only tried the full reboot. I'll test this next time it happens and report back. I'll check top too. Thanks.

The only semi consistent situation is that there appears to be a time element involved. The icon lockup happens more frequently after a long term shutdown (overnight/several hours). Short term shutdowns (a few minutes) don't seem to cause the icon lockup every time. Laborious process to test this, so it might be some time before I can make any conclusions.

[oshunluvr]

Sounds like some process is running via anacron - just guessing here. A boot up might start the process, but an immediate reboot would kill the process and it might not restart.

Also CTRL-ESC should bring up System Activity window and show what's using the most CPU and RAM.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Right now, nothing is using more that 1% of cpu. RAM usage is low with browser (Palemoon), mysqld and Thunderbird at the top of the list and stable. Let me try this the next time I start up the system (could be some hours from now or even tomorrow...).

[TWPonKubuntu]

This glitch may have been fixed. I've been able to start the system after several hours being off and the desktop icons are immediately active. I've also tried logging off and back on again, with no problems.
I'll tentatively call this fixed... This is the development version (Disco 19.04) and updates are frequent, so I'll assume that one of those updates might have fixed this problem.

oshunluver, thanks for your assistance.

[EDIT] NOPE, now (3/7/19), the desktop icons are completely unresponsive, even after multiple (5) reboots of the system. I can still run anything from the software launcher, but that is not very efficient compared to one click from the desktop...

This last episode started after a large system upgrade (189 files).
@snowhawg, yes, I got your post about reporting this directly to Ubuntu. I will check there next.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I may have found a work-around, but not a fix. I opened a new Activity and it populated using the default set of desktop icons (same as the non-working desktop icons). This desktop Activity is fully functional, at this point...

For anyone else running Kubuntu 19.04 who has a similar problem, this may work for you.

[EDIT] The problem remains, on a shutdown and reboot, the new desktop Activity does not allow mouse access to the icons, but when I switch back to the original (default) desktop Activity, the icons are all working... I cannot diagnose this behavior, but it is a work-around.