Fix: Ubuntu 20.04 stuttering animations & video
Ok, this was driving me nuts, but I’m glad I finally figured it out thanks to this.
So the issue was: every 500ms or so, any graphic output would briefly freeze, be it a video playing, a page scrolling, or moving a window around. This issue was persistent right after I upgraded from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 20.04.
The troublemaker: the issue was caused by the “System Monitor” extension. The extension was running in my app indicators toolbar, since I like seeing small bits of stats about CPU load, network usage, etc. Unfortunately, it seems that there is an issue with this extension on the newest version of Ubuntu.
Unsuccessful attempts: I tried reinstalling the Nvidia driver (390.132), tried to install the driver manually instead of using the Ubuntu Drivers tool. Switching to the Nouveau driver had no effect. Choosing a different session from the log in screen (Default Gnome) had no effect either, since my Gnome extensions were running there too for some reasons.
The solution: Disabling the “System Monitor” extension, instantly fixed the issue. If you have the extension running in the app indicators area, simply clicking on it, and choosing “Quit” will do the trick.
Update (June 10th, 2020): My suggestion above is to close the “System Monitor”, also known as the “Indicator Multiload” Gnome extension. If you don’t want to have to deal with closing the app on every system reboot, you can either choose to:
- Disable the extension by unchecking the “System Load Indicator” entry in “Startup Applications”. Hopefully the extension is fixed in the future, so you can re-enable this easily when that happens.
- If you want to completely remove the extension:
sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove indicator-multiloadwhich will remove the extension, its dependencies and the config data.
If you found this helpful, or have a suggestion for this article – let me know in the commentary section below 🙂