Nautilus repeatedly freezing with no apparent reason. How to debug or reset?

Hello!

Lately I’m having issues on my Manjaro GNOME installation, and I can’t find a solution. I have searched for similar issues but they are different or old and were solved with updates.

The issue: Nautilus works fine for a while and then it freezes with no message in the terminal.

The problem shows:

  • Sometimes, when trying to search.
  • Sometimes, just with no apparent reason nor action from my side.

Usually I just kill it and it restarts without issue, but sometimes it won’t open anymore, showing this message when trying from the terminal:

Failed to register: timeout was reached

I’m using Manjaro GNOME (41.5) on X11.

As launching it from the terminal is not providing a lot of info, is there another way I could debug this to find out what the issue is?

I was also considering “resetting” the application, cleaning preferences and reinstalling or something like that, but I’m not sure it’s the correct thing to do.

Hi @eldelacajita, and welcome!

I don’t use Gnome, so not Nautilus either. But after some searching, I came across this page, that states:

Here is a solution I found from the GNOME website. Simply set the environmental variables before launching nautilus, i.e.:

G_DEBUG="all" NAUTILUS_DEBUG="All" nautilus

Logs can be captured from the terminal output.

So try that and see?

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That is not the Gnome Website, but the Ubuntu Wiki. Also it is the old way.

This is used on newer nautilus:

nautilus -q; G_MESSAGES_DEBUG="all" NAUTILUS_DEBUG="all"  nautilus 2>&1 | tee nautilus.log

Be ready for a long trash log to discover.

Also see Projects/Tracker/Documentation/Debugging - GNOME Wiki! for handling tracker issues.

systemctl --user stop tracker-miner-fs-3.service
systemctl --user stop tracker-extract-3.service
systemctl --user stop tracker-miner-rss-3.service
tracker3 reset --rss --filesystem
systemctl --user start tracker-miner-fs-3.service
systemctl --user status tracker-miner-fs-3.service
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You’ll notice that it’s a quote from the AskUbuntu page. :wink:

And thanks. As I mentioned, I don’t use 'em, so that’s only what I could find.

Thanks a lot, @megavolt and @Mirdarthos!
I will try that and see if I can find anything useful in the output.