Files explorer hangs on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS - worked around by killing nautilus

Solution 1:

Try to remove it, do a repo/dependency cleanup, and reinstall it.

sudo apt-get remove nautilus

Cleanup:

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nautilus

Solution 2:

I solved this adding following lines:

vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_ratio = 10

into /etc/sysctl.conf

and running

sudo sysctl -p

Found in this thread: System freezes/unresponsive/unusable when copying large file to USB