Public bug reported:
In Ubuntu ~17 and earlier, when using Gnome-Shell, switching
applications via the standard alt+tab would bring up a display of all
the running gui applications, allowing one to be selected via mouse or
keyboard.
You could select an application by hovering over the application's icon
in this view, but the select required that you to first move your
cursor.
By default, the next to last used application would be selected, even if
the mouse was placed in an area of the screen that caused it to be
hovering over another application when the application switcher display
was shown.
In Ubuntu 18, this behavior has regressed. Now, if the mouse is placed
in an area where the application switcher renders its display, the
switcher will auto-select whatever application is beneath it.
This is immensely frustrating as it breaks the application switcher's
ordering heuristic. The switcher orders applications in the list based
on recency of use, so you can select the most recently used applications
by pressing alt+tab a few times. This makes sense, as the probability of
a user selecting an application is related to how long ago they last
used an application.
However, now that the application switcher immediately selects the
application beneath the mouse, this breaks this functionality. The user
now has to tab over or use the mouse or arrow keys to scroll through a
long list of applications to get to the one they want.
As the application switcher occupies between 1/5 and 1/3 of the screen
space in the vertical center of the screen (depending on resolution and
number of applications running) and the user usually places their cursor
near the center of the screen, there's a good chance that the cursor
will be placed in an area that will cause it to auto-select the wrong
application when the application switcher activates.
The preferred behavior would be in that the application switcher ignores
mouse cursor position when initially rendering and selecting the default
application, until an explicit mouse movement is made. This was the
functionality prior to Ubuntu 18.
** Affects: mutter (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1842745
Title:
Application Switcher Auto-Selects Based on Mouse Hover
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