Users of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS who make use of window snapping to enhance their productivity will be interested in a bug fixes coming down the update pipes shortly.

The Mutter 42.9 update currently in Jammy’s proposed repo contains a fix for high memory and lagginess when resizing side-by-side tiled windows.

Given that Ubuntu 22.04 only supports vertical side-by-side window tiling — the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 supports quarter tiling out-of-the-box — this is likely to be a bug that has affected many users.

I was interested to see if this bug was reproducible on any of my 22.04 installs. I fired up a VM and tiled Nautilus and GNOME Terminal (with btop++ open) side by side. The resizing animation was sluggish and delayed and then… My screen froze.

Windows tiled and resized can max out memory

The VM I used only had 2GB RAM allocated to it, and the last thing reported by btop++ on screen was 1.82GB of 1.92GB memory used. Thus, it’s likely the memory maxed out, rendering the system unresponsive.

This (rather important) bug fix aside, the pending update to Mutter in Jammy also ‘cherry-picks a patch to fix the prompt to enable accessibility features using keyboard shortcuts’, and enables AMD Xilinx/Mali support on Wayland.

Keep an eye on Software Updater so you too can snag this snappy (no, not that one) set of buffs.