Unity gets stuck in workspace switcher

I semi-frequently experience what seems to be a minor yet very annoying bug when using the workspace switcher, starting in 14.04. I had never noticed this in earlier releases of the OS.

Essentially what happens is I get temporarily stuck in the workspace switcher screen (what shows after clicking the "Workspace Switcher" icon) displaying the 4 different workspaces. Normally you would just click one of the workspaces then ubuntu zooms back in on that workspace for you, however clicking the workspaces seems to do nothing when I am hung up.

This seems to happen only some of the time when I am using the workspace switcher to move an open window, say a nautilus file manager window to another workspace.

I have found that frantically pressing esc and/or the windows button at least 10 or 20 times eventually takes me back to a single workspace view. Also that if that mouse is moved every time I press the windows button the window I was moving in between the ws borders will be updated in position on the screen otherwise it will not move on the ws switcher screen.

How can I prevent this from happening?

Alt+Enter does the trick hope it helps you

Exact same problem happens with 16.04 LTS. Moving active windows inn the Workspace Switcher very often causes the GUI to hang, with Unity grayed-out. The windows can still be seen to be updating (and my cron jobs use espeak to talk to me) so I know the underlying system is still running.

Here is one clue as to why: It seems to happen most often when the window between workspaces is being updated a lot, such as a FileZilla window during a transfer, or even the System Monitor.

To recover, just press Alt-F1

This causes it to jump immediately to one of the four workspaces. Seems to pick the workspace that contains the upper-left corner of the application that was being dragged.

Afterwards, everything works normally again.

• Tested successfully in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on two systems with this issue.

I was having this problem. Seemed to have found a workaround by:

1. Install unity-tweak-tool
2. workspace settings -> restore defaults

Note that turning the workspace switcher off and setting the number of workspaces to 1 did not work. Windows would get moved off screen and become inaccessible. Thankfully the "restore defaults" seems to work.