Mouse-and-Keyboard Freezes Problem

Solution:

MATE Tweak - Change Window Manager

MATE Tweak, Windows Options

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INTRODUCTION :

In the 2020-to-2025 time frame (and even before), I was encountering a mouse (and keyboard) freezes problem that I encountered, randomly, for many years on Linux computers, in particular, on a desktop computer with an Ubuntu-MATE distro (Wikipedia link).

Some times the freeze would happen when I was in a web browser, but occasionally it would happen right after I logged in. In that case,the freeze happened when the mouse cursor was on the desktop background, not in an application window.

The only way I could get around the freezes was to power down the computer and wait a few seconds and power up. Then login again and open up all the windows, again, that I needed.

Before 2025, I had done web searches on the problem but never found a solution.

I tried again in early 2025 and found someone who said they used MATE-Tweak to turn off animations.

So I went to MATE-Tweak via the 'System' drop down menu on my Ubuntu-MATE desktop computer, as seen in the following image --- namely
System > Preferences > Look and Feel > MATE Tweak.

When I clicked on the MATE-Tweak option, MATE-Tweak offered a 'Windows' option, as seen in the following image.

Under the 'Performance' section, the 'Enable animations' checkbox option was ON. I unchecked it, but it turned out it did not cure the mouse-freezes problem, because it kept occuring, seemingly randomly, in following days.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I returned to MATE-Tweak and noticed the 'Windows manager' option, which provided the options shown in the following image.

The manager was defaulted to 'Marco (Compton GPU compositor)'. I decided to try no compositor at all, and set the window manager to 'Marco (No compositor)'.

Sure enough. That cured the mouse-and-keyboard freezes problem.

In more than 9 months of using the Ubuntu-MATE desktop computer, I never encountered the freezes that were happening in almost every login session --- or every other login session.

The only significant difference I have seen is, when I open an application, there is often a brief flash of pixels around the desktop background. It looks like an application is checking on the pixel-size of the desktop.

That brief flash does not bother me. It was much more important to stop the mouse-and-keyboard freezes.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

To find more information on mouse (and keyboard) freeze problems, you can try WEB SEARCHES on keywords such as the following.

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Mouse-and-Keyboard Freezes Problem
Solution: MATE Tweak - Change Window Manager.

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Page was created 2025 Nov 08.