Always nice to be greeted by this unlock screen:

Login screen with blurred background and boxes of static that are the right size for a large digital clock and a login message.

Ever since upgrading to the latest NVIDIA driver, my Linux system has had a weird quirk with resuming from suspend/hibernate. All the applications and services that were running pick up right where I left them, but anything drawn by Gnome shell — including the unlock screen, the top bar and the dock — has corrupted text and icons. Sometimes it’ll be missing every few letters (Firefox is often captioned “ire ox”). And sometimes all the letters and icons will just show static.

It clears up if I log out and back in, or reset the display with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. And I recently learned about another useful shortcut for Gnome: Typing “r” in the Alt-F2 “Run Command” box (whether I can read it or not!) will reset Gnome Shell without closing the session, so I can keep all the applications running and actually use suspend for what it’s meant to do — though with an extra step.

Update July 10: The latest driver (515.57) appears to fix it!

From the Gnome 2.10 release notes:

In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.

In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.

About time someone fixed this! The window focus-stealing problem has plagued just about every desktop out there. I think Windows is the first one I noticed that attempted a solution (blinking the taskbar button instead of switching to the dialog box). And since I often fire up several programs at once, it can get really annoying when I start typing my password into one, hoping I’ll finish before the other window appears and drops the last three letters into my web browser or something.

Unfortunately I’ll probably have to wait for Fedora Core 4 to really use it, unless I want to go even more bleeding-edge than I already am.