I have long noticed and been mildly annoyed by the fact that using Alt+Tab to switch windows while dragging something causes the drop to fail when I finally end the drag. For example, the following sequence of actions will function correctly:
- Open 2 nautilus windows, navigate to different folders, and resize each window to each take up half of the screen, side-by-side.
- Click and hold left mouse on a file in one window
- While holding left mouse, move the mouse cursor to the other window
- Release left mouse.
The result will be that the selected file is moved or copied to the other folder. However, the following similar sequence of actions does not function correctly:
- Open 2 nautilus windows, navigate to different folders, and resize each window to take up the entire screen, such that one window is completely hidden behind the other.
- Click and hold left mouse on a file in one window
- While holding left mouse, press Alt+Tab to switch to the other window
- Release left mouse.
This will cause the drag & dropped file to slide back to its original position, and the file will not be copied or moved. More generally, any drag & drop will fail in a similar fashion if Alt+Tab is pressed at any point while holding left mouse. Pressing Alt+Tab does not immediately cancel the drag & drop operation, but whenever the mouse button is subsequently released, the drop will always fail. Re-executing the same drag & drop operation without Alt+Tab will succeed. I have observed this behavior in all versions of GNOME over the past several years up to and including 44, on both X11 and Wayland, on multiple versions of multiple operating systems (at least Manjaro, Ubuntu, and Fedora). As far as I know, the 2nd sequence of actions described above has never worked correctly in any configuration.
I am aware of this previous similar topic, which I suspect might be the same bug, since the person reporting never confirmed whether switching from X11 to Wayland resolved the issue.
Has anyone else observed a similar issue, and if so, do they have a solution for it? Obviously this can always be worked around by resizing windows such that Alt+Tab is not required while dragging, but that’s a pain to do every time, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.