I've been having problems with Cinnamon from Mint 20.3 Una, the windows focus is stable but not the focus of dialogs and selection like the downloads box and others that appear as pop-ups on the screen. These are unstable and a false movement of the mouse to the corners of the screen will cause them to go out of focus to the background. As it is all the time it ends up being annoying. I've already solved the worst of the problem as it was partly in the new window settings: I had to enable "Sloopy Mode", however, it's still unstable, whatever "sloopy mode" means -- it's one of those nerddrel lingo that only native speakers English speakers understand, so it shouldn't even have been used. There are no tags or tutorials that tell you what "sloopy mode" is, except for some javascript tutorials, where that expression could well mean something else... When the developer changes the default mode, it's elegant by warnings that it's necessary reconfigure, but this was not done. Inelegant, to say the least... inelegant. (after all, here we are among friends, but not acquaintances, that you can talk to anyway, anysloopy mode )
And there's an additional problem with Cinnamon that's driving me crazy, because I don't know if it's a problem or just my paranoia: Cinnamon has been slow all of a sudden and crashes every day after 6 hours of use, despite very low cpu usage and of available memory ( i5 cpu with 8Gb available and 10Gb of swap, governor in performance mode ) and I even thought it was the swapiness that I had unconfigured ( my default is 15 ) but the terminal returned me that it remains 15. But when I check data in iotop (a type of htop that displays the I/O operations on the disk, read and write. It's just for that, and it's useful precisely to check if the bottleneck is on the disk), iotop returned me that cinnamon was performing a lot of i/o operations -- 9 concurrent instances -- Detail: all with 0% i/o, no read and no write operations. And here's the reason for the paranoia: 9 instances, okay, nothing surprising! But, all with zero I/O ? Is the sheduller not allocating swapp operations that are not performed despite swapiness=15 ? It would be an explanation for the slowness, but it could also be something normal, but I don't have a criterion for what is "normal" for cinnamon. I don't know how to test beyond that, and there's nothing I can do but keep the machine on as long as possible, with iotop, htop, and i7z open, and try to catch the crash again, early on -- because it gets worse too fast and you can't stop. switch tools. It's not a freeze, it's more like tearing, so I thought it could be the swapiness. So far, I have considered not a bug, but a failure of insufficient configuration in a machine that is very demanding (before I applied performance mode and clock of 260000Khz, the memory consumption was at 80%, now it is at 50%. there's no remedy and there's no way to speed it up, and zeroing swapiness is not feasible until I don't have another DDR here. There was another 4 Gb, but it must have burned. But that didn't happen before the Mint 20.1 upgrade to 20.3. I don't even know if the 4Gb DDR really burned, or if it's stopped working because it's a post-upgrade driver problem. It's quite old. )