GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 710082
Nautilus/Evolution sometime ceases to redraw when dragging items
Last modified: 2013-10-15 07:38:05 UTC
When an item is dragged, Nautilus sometimes only redraws after the first few inches of dragging the items, and then freezes the canvas in place until the item is released. The dragged item will also freeze in place, such that only the X11 "dragging cursor" moves. When the cursor is dragged over a folder, the folder will give no hint that a moving operation can be triggered. When the cursor is released over the folder, the item which has been dragged will not have been moved. The bug occurs sporadically, but once it occurs, the nautilus instance does not seem to recover sporadically. I can reproduce the bug by repeatedly launching Nautilus instances and killing them. About 50% of the instances will exhibit the described behavior. I tried to make a screencast illustrating the bug, however I found that this affects how the bug manifests. If the screencast is being recorded, the canvas will never freeze. Instead, it will be updated intermittedly, in regular intervals (though not as smoothly as during normal operation). If this is a mutter issue, please reassign.
Created attachment 257243 [details] Video demonstrating the drag and drop issue. I can confirm this behavior on my Gnome 3.10 installation. However, I was unable to start an instance of Nautilus not affected by this bug, also screen casting (using Gnome's built in functionality) does not affect it. I have attached a video demonstrating the effect.
The above video captures the same phenomenon I am experiencing.
I noticed that pressing a keyboard key while dragging an item over the frozen canvas will cause a one-time update of the canvas. Also, it seems that this is not a Nautilus-specific issue: Today I noticed that the same issue affects Evolution. In this case, the canvas freeze will only become apparent from the lack of "move hints" on folders. The redraw on key events also applies here. I'm not sure if this indicates that mutter could be the culprit. I'm tentatively reassigning this report to mutter; please reassign again as seen fit. (Also, note that we have https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709313 , which also is a redraw-related bug. I have two machines, only one of which suffers from 70913; the canvas freeze affects both of them, however.)
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 709340 ***