Hi,
Just wanted to share this for whatever its' worth. Feel free to ask for details if anyone's interested. I'll give enough for context. Sorry up front for not being savvy on specific terminology. Ubuntu is a godsend, and I've been a refugee from the windows badlands since about 2016, but have selfishly remained totally in the shadows only ever reading these forums for the tech tips I need to get through whatever I had to get through at the time.
Punchline is that my desktop was in an unusable state this morning, and I had to spend several hours troubleshooting and recovering. First quick fix was temporarily reverting from "performance" to "balanced" on the power management setting. None of this required much technical skill, and much of the difficulty is (admitting this up front) because of my unusual configuration.
My reason for posting is essentially just self-therapy ... but I am interested if anyone is interested in this.
My rig is an ancient dell pc (2007, i think). Again if you're interested and want me to track down technical details, just ask. I connect to the internet via a web proxy, although I haven't yet been able to get apt to work through the proxy with 22. So I initially installed off of a usb and configured the box by temporarily hogging the direct connection. Also installed chrome at that time, because firefox doesn't work on all sites through the proxy. Also, had used
powerprofilesctl set performance
to change the performance setting .. even just a half-minutes use with the balanced setting is rather intolerable given how underpowered and how little memory this machine has. I'd been happily enjoying an lts 18 rig on a better machine that suddenly glitched a few months back now, and can't afford a replacement at this time.
The Symptoms:
() at first it seemed the mouse buttons didn't work, circumventing them revealed it was intermittent, and as was later proven out, was not a hardware problem.
() the problem continued after a reboot and was exacerbated by the disappearance of the mouse pointer except on the top and left bars (whatever you call them thingys).
() eventually, while I was text editing (emacs) the cursor started jumping, that's when I gave up and realized I couldn't work until this was fixed
() opening settings failed, and running gnome-control-center from a console gave me the error below
() eventually, when trying to fix the issue, a console I was using kept rendering the string "low", in bursts
Seems like some thread of something somewhere was trying to output this message ... "low", and was interfering with all of these other operations in doing so
The error I got from opening settings on a console was as followsgnome-control-center:4710): cc-power-profile-row-CRITICAL **: 20:12:10.458: cc_power_profile_row_get_radio_button: assertion 'CC_IS_POWER_PROFILE_ROW (self)' failed
**
power-cc-panel:ERROR:../panels/power/cc-power-panel.c:1122erformance_profile_set_active: assertion failed: (button)
Bail out! power-cc-panel:ERROR:../panels/power/cc-power-panel.c:1122erformance_profile_set_active: assertion failed: (button)
Aborted (core dumped)
================================
So from that google led me here ->
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/20...pu-performance
And changing the power management setting to "balanced" seemed to restore normal desktop function.
I did a long-delayed apt update and upgrade and a cycle of app updates by reverting to the direct connection from proxy
(which is what took so much time) and replaced chrome with opera in the hopes of preventing this from recurring
I suspect chrome because I had noticed that in recent days using chrome resulted in a major overall performance hit.
I speculate that although apt can't use the proxy, I'd done enough proxy configuration on the box trying to get that
to work that some applications or sub-sets of the os WERE getting through and updating themselves.
I suspect this because I hadn't installed anything new on the machine since the initial configuration that could
explain why it suddenly destabilized like that. The installers on previous installs of 16 and 18 had correctly self
configured during install so that apt worked through my web proxy. Not the case with 22.
Anyways, thanks for your interest.