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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.

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crmpicco
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  • did you try reinstall nautilus in case something needed got uninstalled while uninstalling something else ? or did this error happen right after ubuntu installation ? – Pavlos Theodorou Jan 27 '17 at 08:22

3 Answers3

9

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
muru
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Watercolours
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  • On a standard Ubuntu wouldn't this also remove the ubuntu-desktop package? Wouldn't you need to reinstall that also? – wildintellect Jun 28 '17 at 03:19
  • Does one need to reboot for this to be effective? – WhereIsTheManual Oct 19 '23 at 19:58
  • I think one needs to reboot as well. I was trying to solve a problem with the failure of windows spawned from Nautilus/Files to accept any mouse actions other than closing the window. The rest of the desktop seems to be "working" well. Windows for Chrome or other applications accepted mouse actions in a normal manner. I had tried various killall actions to attempt purging the system of running instances of nautilus. So after restart the Files icon lauches the file manager and all is well. – WhereIsTheManual Oct 19 '23 at 20:48
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

linuxmarc
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0

Reinstalling Nautilus was not enough for me but the problem resolved when I changed and re-set region & language settings and logged back in.

anon
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