Files explorer hangs on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS - worked around by killing nautilus

Question

I have an issue where almost every time I use the Files file explorer it hangs and fails to open.

I found a temporary workaround on this thread which suggests doing a sudo killall nautilus to kill nautilus, which works, but I don't understand why I have to do this.

I am running Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS.

Solution 1

Try to remove it, do a repo/dependency cleanup, and reinstall it.

sudo apt-get remove nautilus

Cleanup:

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nautilus

Solution 2

I solved this adding following lines:

vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_ratio = 10

into /etc/sysctl.conf

and running

sudo sysctl -p

Found in this thread: System freezes/unresponsive/unusable when copying large file to USB

Comments

[Pavlos Theodorou]

did you try reinstall nautilus in case something needed got uninstalled while uninstalling something else ? or did this error happen right after ubuntu installation ?

[wildintellect]

On a standard Ubuntu wouldn't this also remove the ubuntu-desktop package? Wouldn't you need to reinstall that also?