Busted drag & drop, begone!

Ubuntu 24.04 Update Fixes Several Touchscreen Quirks

An update to the Mutter display manager is primed to start rolling out to users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (and 24.10) with a couple of much-needed touchscreen fixes in tow.

Now, I don’t know how many of you use Ubuntu desktop on a touch-enabled device—not many, I’d wager.

I do; I have a touchscreen laptop that runs Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. I often prod, poke, and push the screen a bit whilst using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to do simple things like select menu items, close windows, scroll, etc – nothing I can’t do using the touchpad, it’s just easier to lift a hand up and use touch.

Though my device is able to fold to resemble one, I don’t use it as a tablet as, despite assumptions, GNOME Shell is not what I’d call a touch-centric¹ UX – touch-friendly, sure.

But it seems the experience of using Ubuntu with a touchscreen is going to be a little better soon.

An update to Mutter is making its way out to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (and 24.10) users. It includes several touch-focused fixes, including a patch to make touch-initiated drag and drop actually work as intended.

Honestly: that bug has bugged me for a while.

I can’t use my finger to drag and drop files in Nautilus to move or copy them to a different folder or location (like on to the desktop). Something in the stack doesn’t register touch initiated dragging in the correct way.

The pending update to Mutter, currently in the noble-proposed updates repo, finally solves it.

It could be coincidental but this update solves another frustrating finger-related “bug” that has irritated me for a while, whereby GNOME apps often ignore mouse and touch input after initial touch input. I have to use the keyboard to interact at all (even to close it) after which it responds again.

The mutter 46.2-1ubuntu0.24.04.6 backports patches to:

• Avoid full framebuffer damage when dragging a window (#2080698)
• Fix crash with pointer-constraints and touch (#2090824)
• Fix touchscreen drag and drop (#1966635)

Plus:

• Sync touchscreen enabled state when added to device mapper (#2087831)
• Silence lintian error about the version of two new symbols

Presently, thus Mutter update is in the proposed repo where it can be tested fully (as Mutter is composed of many interconnected packages). Should no issues arise, it will roll out as a regular software update in the coming weeks.

This update is not a major one but it’s still welcome (by me, if no-one else). That smaller quality-of-life tweaks, buffs, and backports continuing to arrive to LTS users is testament to the value in using it.

1. GNOME Shell is touch-friendly, but it is not touch-led: the UI doesn’t adapt to or revolve around gesture input the same way smartphone and tablet OSes do. It helps to frame it as ‘which input feels optional?’ – cf. iPadOS where touch is essential to the UX, even with a mouse. ↩︎