A software bug causes garbage data to be written to the unity greeter state file which makes file large to open causing a slow down.
Chance of causing the last logged in user to be broken.
This creates an empty state file owned by root which unity-greeter (running as the lightdm user) cannot overwrite and therefore cannot corrupt. It means the greeter no longer preselects the user who logged in last, but for some people that's a price worth paying. It also provides an easy way to test the bahaviour of unity-greeter to identify what is causing a particular slowdown.
However, the real problem still needs to be fixed and (hopefully) an SRU (stable release update) submitted for 12.04.
It's been 4 weeks since Michael's fix for this was merged into trunk. Any chance this bug report could be updated?
Even better, could an SRU be made?
LightDM has too many flaws. GDM needs to be made the Ubuntu default once more until the development team gets things straightened out with LightDM.
Hey Michael, do you think we could SRU that fix for the LTS .1?
I found the problem causing most, if not all of the mouse problems on LightDM: The Ambiance and/or Radiance themes. To fix the problem, install the Ubuntu Tweak PPA "ppa:tualatrix/ppa", install Ubuntu Tweak, and go to Ubuntu Tweak<Tweaks<Login Settings. Change the GTK theme to something else besides Ambiance or Radiance. A good, solid choice may be Adwaita.
*edit: Choose Adwaita as the GTK theme. No others work.
The attachment "Untitled.png" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.
Please note that if a different greeter theme is used in LightDM, the lag issue also stops. Unity-Greeter needs to be handled by LightDM as a .conf file, not through the other stuff 12.04 currently has to control configuration. Every LightDM greeter I use that is controlled by a .conf file works perfectly fine, with no errors.
Accepted unity-greeter into precise-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-greeter/0.2.8-0ubuntu1.2 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.
I followed the steps of the test case described in the bug description and I confirm that the proposed package resolves this issue.
This bug does not appear to related to light-themes, marking bugtask Invalid.