2 min read

Stop "[Application]" Is Not Responding on Ubuntu 22.04/Gnome

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04, I’ve been seeing a lot more of those messages from Gnome that say:

“[Some Application]” is not responding. You may choose to wait a short while for it to continue or force the application to quit entirely.

A dialog that reads "Thunderbird Mail" is not responding. You may choose to wait a short while for it to continue or force the application to quit entirely. There are two buttons, "Force Quit" and "Wait"

Probably Ubuntu 22.04 takes up more resources on my underpowered mini PC. This error pops up when an app is not responsive for more than 5 seconds.

Luckily, that timeout is configurable. I’m not as impatient as the Gnome developers, so I adjusted mine to 15 seconds. In theory this gets stored so you don’t need to do anything to make it permanent:

$ gsettings get org.gnome.mutter check-alive-timeout uint32 5000
$ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter check-alive-timeout 15000

You probably don’t want to set this much below 1000 or you’re going to be dealing with lots of dialogs that block the rest of the UI.