WARNING: Critical bug in GNOME's Mutter 48.3 breaks your desktop. Fix inside!
WARNING: Critical bug in GNOME's Mutter 48.3 breaks your desktop. Fix inside!

WARNING: Critical bug in GNOME's Mutter 48.3 breaks your desktop. Fix inside!

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/pilkyton on 2025-05-31 14:44:37+00:00. *** Bug:
GNOME introduced a new algorithm in Mutter 48.3 (the compositor) which is supposed to track the state of windows better, but it ended up causing a bug which means that the compositor randomly STOPS reacting to mouse cursor events (hover, click, etc stop working or become extremely offset) for certain windows. The mouse cursor can also become nonsensical, such as showing a "resize" cursor in the middle of the window, etc, due to Mutter messing up the offsets of what it believes the click region to be.
Your application windows will then seemingly freeze and become unresponsive, and the only solution is to force the application to quit via a task manager or keyboard shortcuts (since the keyboard controls still work, usually).
The bug is triggered when windows change between certain states, and affects all applications that change window states in such a way to trigger the bug. It heavily affects Chromium-based browsers, Electron-based apps, Steam, etc, and means that those windows will randomly freeze and stop responding to mouse clicks.
It affects Wayland, X11, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, etc, equally, since users of all those systems have reported this bug!
They found the bug 2 days ago and fixed it yesterday. The fix is scheduled for Mutter 48.4:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/4138
Solution:
In the meantime, the only solution for Fedora users is to downgrade to the previous package. But DON'T use "sudo dnf downgrade", since that gives you the old Mutter 48.1 version that shipped on launch day of Fedora 42, which has many other bugs. Instead, we should downgrade to the PREVIOUS package: Mutter 48.2-2.
So I've created a oneliner command for you all which automatically fetches the previous Mutter package version for your exact CPU architecture. It's really that simple!
sudo dnf in koji && cd $(mktemp -d) && pwd && koji download-build -a noarch -a $(uname -m) mutter-48.2-2.fc42 && sudo dnf in ./mutter-48.2-2.fc42.*.rpm ./mutter-common-48.2-2.fc42.noarch.rpm
After running the command, just reboot your machine to finish the process. Then wait for the release of Mutter 48.4 before you upgrade again. :)
PS: You can ignore the /tmp
directory after install. It gets cleared when you reboot the machine.
Have fun!
Edit with some news: Fedora developers are now talking about backporting the bugfix into Mutter 48.3 to get it out sooner. Therefore I'll add this extra detail:
- Bugged:
48.3-1.fc42
- Fix will be in
48.3-2.fc42
or any newer-X
revision number.
So if you see such an update in the coming days, you can upgrade back to 48.3. As long as you avoid 48.3-1, the bugged version!