Ubuntu – Eclipse not working properly: GUI glitches etc

16.04eclipsejavaopenjdk

I've recently installed Ubuntu 16.04 Beta on my system, because I need a lot of newer packages for development.

Eclipse has been very very difficult though. I've worked with Eclipse Mars on 14.04 and didn't notice any issues.
Here, it started with installation, or at least at the time I thought my problems were due to installing Eclipse manually to /opt.
I've since used the installer and the default settings.

In Eclipse, there are plenty of GUI glitches:

The entries in the Menubar menus were grayed out, until hovering with the mouse (e.g., Window ->)

The Window->Preferences Dialog doesn't appear, or only appears after several seconds.

Selecting the sub-menus in the Preferences Dialog doesn't display those pages (stays at "General").

CPU Util seems quite high.

Deleting a Project hung Eclipse with 100% CPU Util and I had to kill it (and delete .workspace)

i.e., unusable

Not sure if it's about OpenJDK8, or maybe a GTK3 related problem (since most of the bugs are graphical)?
Anyone else having those issues?

Best Answer

I've also posted this question on the Eclipse Forums: https://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/m/1728570/#msg_1728570

It seems to be an issue with Eclipse and GTK3. There is no real fix and it's not clear if they will back-port the fix from the next Eclipse release. Anyway, there are 2 ways to deal with this:

1) Define the environment variable SWT_GTK3=0, to fall back on GTK2, e.g.:

$> SWT_GTK3=0 eclipse

2) Run the latest Milestone of Eclipse Neon (4.6) [Official release date is end of June, but seems pretty stable already]

I went with the latter one.

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Ubuntu – Eclipse/Java integration not working after Ubuntu 12.04 upgrade

Eclipse is extremely "version sensitive" platform ecosystem.

I've been using eclipse for 9 years, since the 2.x era. Almost every plugin I've used, had to be installed with an exact version of its dependencies, any slight variation and the result was an unstable IDE all over.

If you are going to be programming in JEE, I strongly recommend to use the downloaded one from Eclipse's site, whenever possible install plugins through eclipse's update facility. You'll live longer, and happier :)

I'm a JEE developer for the past 6 years, and every time I tried to use Eclipse from repository, the result was awful, too much instability, and many plugins did not worked as expected (Jboss Tools for instance).

I've had some problems recently, running JBossWS, with 3.7.x versions, it often crashed on 64Bit, Mint 12(Ubuntu 11.10), so I decided to downgrade to Eclipse 3.6.

Ubuntu – Eclipse not launching

My first suggestion would be to run, from command line:

sudo apt-get -f install eclipse

Alternative:

This resource may be of help to you. I can confirm the process works on Ubuntu 14.04, as that is what I am using, and it cleanly upgraded my version of Eclipse to Kepler, and should resolve issues with your install. Here is the process, borrowed from the above link:

Run the below commands in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y oracle-jdk7-installer
update-alternatives --display java
Be sure to check your Java version to make sure it's 1.7 or greater:
java -version
Download a version of Eclipse from the website. If you don't know what flavor to use, just use the Classic version.
Unpack the archive that you downloaded:
cd Downloads
tar xvf [the file name you downloaded].tar.gz
Back up your old Eclipse version (if any):
sudo mv /usr/lib/eclipse /usr/lib/eclipse-old
Move the version of Eclipse you downloaded to /usr/lib:
sudo mv eclipse /usr/lib
If this is a fresh install, you'll need to add a link to /usr/bin so you can run Eclipse:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/eclipse

Note: using this process, you will have to reinstall any plugins and re-add any update sources from previous build (at least, I did). However, you get a clean install of a newer version, which should resolve your issues. Good luck.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Eclipse/Java integration not working after Ubuntu 12.04 upgrade

Ubuntu – Eclipse not launching

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