Trisquel 9's Application Launcher keeps saying "Applications Updated." over and over

OK, I found this bug on Trisquel 9 Ethiopia that is driving me crazy for two days now and it has started up my OSD .

I don’t know why it was not giving me problems until today, and I don’t understand why nobody has reported it already since I couldn’t find any info on the forum or the bug tracker.

Anyway, when I’m trying to check the applications installed on my system using the application launcher on the application tab it keeps saying “Applications Updated.” blinking (like refreshing the menu) over and over again without letting me navigate through the menu at all. The worse part is that, when it starts doing this, it seems it also affects the performance of the entire user interface some how.

At first I thought it had something to do with my keyboard pressing some key I was not seeing, or maybe something to do with my computer graphic card, but after trying Ethiopia on another computer and testing “xev”, the problem kept coming and no key seemed to be being pressed at all.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to have the app launcher store logs or run it verbosely on a virtual console to figure out if it was giving an explanation of the problem. I didn’t try to see if it was possible to do it with the whole panel thought. If some one knows a way I could try this please let me know.

Any way the first thing I tried while trying to solve the issue was to backup my files and re install Ethiopia. You should have seen my face when at the middle of the installation, Ethiopia start doing it on the live USB pen drive session

I couldn’t figure out how this issue is trigger. If you start a live session from a USB trisquel’s installer, at first the problem doesn’t show up, but if you keep doing random things, after a while the problem will show up. Easiest way for me to trigger the bug was to simply start the installation process and the problem will show up in the middle of it.

Once installed on the hard drive, the problem will not show up until later by doing also random staff on it, in my case the easiest way for me to make it come out was to update the system. Once the problem arise it doesn’t go away even if you reboot the system. Oddly enough the problem is replicated on other users accounts on the system without having to wait anymore for the issue to show there too.

Now, this means that if you guys have been using Ethiopia for a while, you might be experience it too. Haven’t any of you guys encountered this issue? As I said I already tried in a different computer so it weird that it would be only me.

All this findings make me believe that the issue might be trigger by some operation that Ethiopia takes time to accomplish before the issue arise. Maybe some indexing of the menu items or something?

Another thing that happens when this issue arise, is that when trying to use the “Add Widgets...” on the context menu of the panel, the window showing the so called widgets also is blinking as the app menu does, like if it were being updated over and over again and scrolling the list all the way up, and very difficultly, allowing you to pick one if you do it fast enough.

The only “fix” I have found so far is to change the language, log out of the current user, and log back in, but that appears to solve the issue temporally. I have tried to use US-English and ES-Spanish, but in both case the issue arise after a while. Currently I’m using UK-English while I’m typing this and surprisingly it might have fixed the issue for now. Although I have to come to terms with having to call the “trash can” a “waste bin” instead (I’m from Mexico and speak Spanish BTW). In any case, if I switch back to Spanish or English the problem shows right a way. ¿Could it be that it does have something to do with the locales?

Anyway, I’m creating a bug report right now, and hopefully my temporally “fix” can help some one out there. I’m also making another bug report that I found while trying to fix this issue where the app launcher’s “Edit Applications” item on its context menu doesn’t do anything as well.

Thank you everyone. I’ll see you soon.