F42 Gnome: windows become inactive, unresponsive, unreachable by mouse; occasionally mouse scrolling stops working, but scrollbar slider remains operational (mutter bug)

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Hi guys! Not sure if this is related to the issues mentioned above.
I’m on Fedora 42 GNOME, running on a ThinkPad E16 (Intel, Integrated GPU).

Since May 28, I’ve been experiencing strange behavior:

Sometimes windows become inactive, unresponsive, and unreachable by mouse or touchpad — I can’t select content or click buttons — although they can still be somewhat operated using the keyboard.
Occasionally, especially in Firefox, mouse scrolling stops working, although the scrollbar slider remains operational.

After restarting the affected app, both the window interactions and scrolling return to normal — but after a while, the problem repeats.

I’ve encountered this on both X11 and Wayland, though it seems to happen more frequently under X11.
I also tried running different kernel versions (6.14.8, 6.14.6, and 6.14.5) — but the behavior remains the same across all of them.
I haven’t seen anything clearly related in the system journal, except maybe this one entry:

polkitd
Error converting subject to JS object: Process 67745 terminated

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Hey guys! Just in case you’re wondering what happened to my Fedora — here’s the info.
Sorry for the off-topic!

Update (Sunday June 1st, 2025): We have resolved the issue in the new mutter-48.3-2 package. However, it will take up to 24 hours to propagate to all the DNF package mirrors. Please continue using the workaround below until you see the fixed package in your DNF update list!

Solution

While we wait for Mutter to release a fixed version, the only solution for Fedora users is to downgrade to the previous package version.

Warning: DON’T use “sudo dnf downgrade”, since that gives you the old Mutter 48.1 version that shipped on launch day of Fedora 42, which has LOTS of older bugs (read this if you don’t believe it).

We should instead downgrade to the PREVIOUS, most recent stable Mutter package: Mutter 48.2-2.

I’ve created a oneliner command for you which automatically fetches the previous Mutter package version for your exact CPU architecture. It’s really that simple!

sudo dnf in koji && cd $(mktemp -d) && pwd && koji download-build -a noarch -a $(uname -m) mutter-48.2-2.fc42 && sudo dnf in ./mutter-48.2-2.fc42.*.rpm ./mutter-common-48.2-2.fc42.noarch.rpm

After running the command, just reboot your machine to finish the process. You can verify that it worked by checking mutter --version in a terminal. Then wait for the release of Mutter 48.3.1 before you upgrade Mutter again. :slight_smile:

If you want to perform regular system updates in the meantime, you can tell DNF to skip the Mutter packages, to avoid accidentally reinstalling 48.3, via the following command:

sudo dnf update --refresh --exclude="mutter,mutter-common"

PS: You can ignore the /tmp directory after install. It gets cleared when you reboot the machine.

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