GNOME Will No Longer Crash If Attaching A Monitor While The System Is Suspended

On GNOME 3.26~3.28, if attaching a monitor to the system while suspended -- such as when setting up for a presentation with a laptop and projector/monitor -- when resuming the system, GNOME Shell would likely crash. That rather glaring bug has now been fixed in the newest Mutter code.

Bug #786929 that dates back nearly one year is now resolved. The issue comes down to "Attaching a monitor to laptop while in suspend and then waking up laptop will reliably crash gnome-shell."

This crash has been resolved in the Mutter back-end code by better tracking of each logical monitor to all monitors assigned to it. All monitors have a reference to each output and each output has a reference to any CRTC. With that better reference tracking, it should avoid a race condition on events between the display hot-plug event and trying to access the associated state.

That code is now merged into Mutter for what will be part of GNOME 3.30 in September.