I installed GCC the other day thinking it would make things easier. I clicked on "Devices" and have been stuck on this page ever since. The keyboard shortcuts it offers from the drop down menu do not work. Escape button does not work. Back arrow does not work. "Help" menu doesn't offer troubleshooting, neither does Ubuntu help.

I ended up uninstalling Gnome Control Center, reinstalled it and guess what? It opens with the "Devices" page and I'm stuck there all over again.

(I uninstalled it again just now. I might leave it that way. I read GCC is part of X Windows (whatever that is) and it and KDE are a safety hazard anyway? I might just leave it uninstalled if that's the case.)


As far as I know everything is updated, I check every day. Is this unresponsiveness a common issue? And why would keyboard shortcuts not work with an ordinary keyboard?

Thanks.

It's either Alt+← or clicking on the < button on the top left.

If you run
you'll see the names of all available panels. Starting it with a panel name as argument will bring you directly to that panel, e.g.

If you are running gnome, then in the upper right corner of the screen is a set of icons, including the power symbol, volume icon, etc. Clicking on that area of the top bar gives you the dropdown menu that includes "settings" which is another name for the gnome-control-center. There you should have full functionality of the control center.

Note: GCC usually refers to the GNU Compiler Collection, which is a bunch of development tools and unrelated to Gnome Control Center.

This is inaccurate and/or a misunderstanding, regardless of which one the acronym refers to.

Compiler shouldn't affect gnome-software but if you want to try you can un-install compiler.

More likely other issue from data problem on drive or link or permissions or such.

I get the feeling that the control center has specific program names that could be run directly.

In some cases the permission pop up to authenticate root goes behind the current window. Alt+tab might show it.

Thank you all. I had uninstalled everything related to Gnome that I’d previously installed but I will give this a try again, for sure.

This whole time i had a feeling that my installation wasn’t somehow complete. There has been a recurring problem of getting GUIs to work with the exception of Zenmap. And then it occurred to me the other day that I forgot one important thing touted everywhere that is one of the “first 10 things” or “first 24 things” to do immediately after installing Linux: to update everything with a sudo command. But I had seen the Update Manager do it’s thing and thought it was enough. So the other night I updated in the terminal and what do you know - a whole bunch of updates occurred, including one for Tricia which I would have thought the Update Manager would automatically want to install. (I have since read in another forum that those updates initiated from the terminal should be avoided by newbies. Others of course dispute this. So…)

(There seemed to be more functionality and a different look after those surprising (to me) updates but I didn’t have much time to enjoy them because I since realized that I have somehow acquired a back door Trojan or whatever. Disappointing and scary especially since I don’t know how bad it is and what to do.)

This is true for Linux Mint and often overlooked by users of other Debian-based distros.
Linux Mint uses a special system of marking upgrades as safe (green), mostly safe (yellow) and not safe (red). By default, I think, it only upgrades the green stuff.
Doing an 'apt upgrade' in a terminal cuts through all that and upgrades everything - green, yelllow, red.
Since I'm not a Mint user myself, I suggest you ask this specific question on their forums.

Yeah, that's unlikely.
Requires a whole new thread with serious problem description & troubleshooting.