COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that.
I'm pretty sure it's a window manager issue. gksudo (?) requests focus, and then while you're typing something happens and your keyboard loses focus on the password field and keystrokes go to an app behind that window.
there were also other fun things like running an app in a debugger, then setting a breakpoint in that app triggered by a UI event, would then immediately cause the entire desktop environment to lockup to mouse events. you'd have to use the keyboard to trigger the "application unresponsive" window and then tab to "close".
> COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that.
I'm not referring to that, I'm referring to the "COSMIC" extensions to GNOME that PopOS adds to reshape GNOME into their vision of a desktop environment (the vision is what they call COSMIC). Those COSMIC extensions are the predecessor to the COSMIC DE, which is a standalone instantiation and elaboration of that vision, and have been part of PopOS and enabled by default for a very long time. The COSMIC extensions are extremely extensive, substantially changing several huge aspects of gnome, as well as being written in typescript, then compiled to JavaScript and then translated into GJS with a — I kid you not — a sed script. So I think it's entirely possible that your problems could have been caused by those extensive extensions, and not the gnome window manager itself. Especially since other users of gnome haven't shared your experiences.
There's also the fact that pop OS's version of gnome is now more than 2 years behind and they still haven't updated it, since they are holding back waiting for cosmic de to be ready instead, so you may have been experiencing a bug that has long been fixed for everyone else. System 76 seems to try to do their best to update a lot of the packages in pop os's repos, but they can't keep everything artificially up to date since they aren't tracking Upstream Ubuntu updates anymore, either, since all of their resources are going to Cosmic de, so a whole bunch of packages including for instance node are two years out of date on PopOS, not just gnome, incidentally.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but what annoys me about this on Fedora is that I use full disk encryption in my notebook, so I need to type the password after the reboot for the updates and then one more time to get it running again. I wish it could deactivate all services and somewhat return to a state similar to early boot in order to apply the updates, rebooting only once afterward. This would be especially useful for shutdown updates, in which case no password would be necessary.
I was hoping that systemd's soft reboot function would help a lot here. It would make it unnecessary to request password when using full disk encryption and would require less downtime. Last I checked it didn't work in Silverblue though.
