Things that bug me about Ubuntu
1) Sometimes, when I log in, the cursor is invisible. The trackpad still works; I just can’t see what I’m pointing at, and have to guess based on rollover hilights. The only thing that fixes this problem is to suspend/sleep/whatever it is and then wake the machine back up again.
2) Sometimes, when I log in, a message pops up telling me something about a “local network service” that is incompatible with something called an “Avahi” service, and that one or the other of these services – it’s not clear which – has been disabled. I have no idea what any of this means; none of the system configuration programs have anything to say about “Avahi”.
3) The computer does not consistently go to sleep when I close it. Sometimes it does; sometimes it just sits there, screen glowing and fan running, until it either runs out of battery or irritates me so much I go do something about it. This may be an Eee PC hardware problem, but I’m blaming it on Linux because it’s the kind of fit-and-finish detail the Linux people don’t seem to notice.
4) The updater system is complicated, confusing, and doesn’t even work. The “Administration” directory has a program called “Update Manager”, and a separate program called “Synaptic Package Manager”, both of which appear to do more or less the same thing. I might have a better idea what the difference was if either program actually worked; instead, whenever I try to install or update anything, I get a series of error messages about “mirror.uoregon.edu”. What is mirror.uoregon.edu, why does my computer’s OS depend on it, and what am I supposed to do to fix this problem? I have no idea. Thus my package information has not been updated in 356 days, as the update manager helpfully pops up and tells me every month or so, despite the fact that I turned the automatic “check for updates” feature off owing to the above mirror.uoregon.edu problem.
5) Sometimes the network menu doesn’t show up when I log in, and it is impossible to tell whether the machine is connected to a wireless network,or to instruct it to log in to some new network. I have no idea why this happens. Restarting the machine usually fixes the problem.
I actually like this little computer quite a lot, and I think the Ubuntu people have done a pretty good job at polishing up the chaotic wilderness that is Linux. I am just frustrated by design misfeatures which leave me feeling like I am not the one in control of my own computer. Since I have no idea what to do about any of this, I’m posting it in hopes that people who work on the various components of this system may somehow, someday, perform some google search which puts them in touch with this post and thereby gain some insight into issues they might consider working on.
#1 is weird, I’ve never seen that. Are you using a mildly unusual pointing device?
#2 I don’t know much about Avahi either; AIUI it’s some sort of local network-service auto-discovery thing. Not entirely sure what sorts of local services it auto-detects. Print serving? File serving? dunno.
#3 can’t comment on, as I usually disable sleep-on-close. I prefer to explicitly ask for it.
#4 Update Manager and Synaptic aren’t quite the same thing. Synaptic lets you pick new programs that you want to install, that aren’t installed, or uninstall ones you currently have installed (I usually use command-line programs for this, but do occasionally use Synaptic). Update Manager just checks for and installs newer versions of things that you already have (it can also be used to upgrade to the newest available Ubuntu release). They both rely on your specified package repository/mirror being actually available; not really the tools’ fault IMO. You should experiment with using a different mirror for your packages, which is configured in the “settings” bit from Update Manager (it also used to be available from the menus separately as “Software Sources”, but apparently that’s gone in Maverick, or at least I can’t find it in my Japanese-language localized version of the menus :D ); or manually fix them in /etc/apt/sources.list (make a backup first). It might possibly not be your main repository that it’s complaining about, but some optional third-party thing that’s in your /etc/sources.d/ or something, I dunno.
#5 is definitely annoying. I don’t have that issue, but on Lucid or Maverick, the default theme seems to randomly glitch and hide away the power off/reboot/suspend icon on the far-right, which is damned annoying. So far it seems to be switched by changing themes; but it’s odd for the default theme to glitch like that (it’s happened on multiple laptops).
The little and mild, but annoying (especially together) glitches of the type you describe have been termed a “death by a thousand papercuts”, and apparently either Lucid or Maverick’s primary goals included addressing some of the worst of these, but I honestly didn’t notice much of a difference (and didn’t expect to). I know they really don’t have the resources to deal with the little things, when there’s always some bigger things to deal with, but it definitely does inhibit the whole user-experience thing, especially for people who (unlike me) may not have “gotten used” to some of them. Of course, I probably avoid many of them simply by still preferring the command line for many things that other users will use some recommended GUI for.
In addition to the hidden power button glitch, another thing that has bothered me, at least in Lucid (only just installed Maverick on a new personal laptop, so haven’t encountered it there yet), is that the Update Manager will often helpfully pop up to let me know that there are new versions of things available, but when I click the install button, nothing pops up or does anything; I have to close the window, and go to the menus and reopen it.
There’s also the fact that gnome-terminal is one of the buggiest terminal emulators anywhere, but remains Ubuntu’s default terminal-emulator (I really blame the GNOME folks on that one, not so much Ubuntu). I’ve switched to xterm, but at least the one from the last few versions of Ubuntu have a strange and annoying glitch with displaying the pop-up menus that are supposed to come up when you control-click on the terminal. For some reason, it doesn’t display all the menu items, until I select one of the few that are visible initially; then the next time it’ll come up fine (and I may have to deselect whatever I had to select to get it to display properly). *shrug*. When I find time, sometimes I try to fix some of my own papercuts, but (a) I often don’t have time for that, and (b) in many cases, I’ve become accustomed to quick workarounds (that still obviously contribute to a poor user experience, but they’re “good enough” for me).
Still, in a world where they still often have to constantly fight to implement drivers for hardware whose designers don’t bother to publish specs, I’m amazed how often the important things usually “just work” in Ubuntu. Though obviously not as reliably as on Windows or (when applicable) Mac OS, since in those cases the vendors are required to provide working drivers.
Comment by Micah Cowan — October 16, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
Hey Micah – thanks for commenting. I thought you might understand some of this better than I do!
#1: just using the trackpad built into the Eee pc. No idea. Shouldn’t it be a standard USB device?
#2: I searched on “disable Avahi” and it turns out that this is Ubuntu’s name for Bonjour/zeroconf. I don’t know exactly what to do about the alert message, but at least now I know what “Avahi” means.
#3: Update manager settings, ok. I’ll check it out.
I do use the command line quite a lot. About all I use my Ubuntu machine for is coding and web-browsing; I do all the coding in the terminal, since I don’t really know anything about Linux IDEs and suspect that they are probably all frustrating; obviously web browsing is all Firefox. Aside from that I just use the Easy Peasy GUI system for launching apps. Anytime I want to move files around or edit them, I use the command line. I just don’t want to waste a lot of time digging around in the details; I just want it to work.
Hmmm… I wonder what driver work is like. I have the impression that anything related to the Linux kernel is a rigidly stratified hierarchy, but maybe drivers for obscure platforms like the Eee pc are more open to random hackers.
Comment by Mars Saxman — October 16, 2010 @ 9:45 pm
I should also point out the fact that I have been trying to like Linux since approximately 1998; that I have stuck with it for over a year, as the only OS on my only laptop, and I have fewer than a dozen things to complain about, suggests that it has made quite a bit of progress in that span of time. Not bad for what is basically a collective volunteer effort.
Comment by Mars Saxman — October 16, 2010 @ 9:50 pm
“I do use the command line quite a lot.”
Oh, well yeah, I assumed you did. I just meant that there are a lot of these little papercuts, and using the command line probably exposes me (and you) to fewer of them than GUI-centric users. Though on second thought, if I wasn’t such a terminal freak, there are some papercuts (such as gnome-terminal and xterm’s bugginess I described) that I wouldn’t know about.
Comment by Micah Cowan — October 17, 2010 @ 12:29 pm
What bugs me ?
The fact that I actually NEED to use the command line just to use it effectively.
At least in OS X you CAN use the command line if you want but are not compelled to.= (unless you really want to twiddle things at a very low level)
Once Ubuntu or some other distro reaches that level then desktop linux for the masses might really take off.
Comment by norman — October 20, 2010 @ 8:30 am
@norman,
I think you’re wrong about NEEDing to use the command line to use Ubuntu effectively. Personally, I revel in the command line, and get things accomplished much much faster in general there. But there’s not a damned thing I do in Ubuntu that I couldn’t do in a GUI (aside from wonderful things like looping over files to do batch transformations or discoveries, which is why I love the command line in the first place). What exactly are you thinking of when you say you’re compelled to use the command line? The only exceptions I can think of is if for some reason there isn’t a handy driver for your hardware available, and you’re forced to build/install ndiswrapper yourself, or something (ick!), but I haven’t had to do that for some time.
Comment by Micah Cowan — October 20, 2010 @ 2:13 pm
Hah, that’s why I had installed OS X on my Eee PC :)
Had, because one day, when I tried to upgrade the rather little RAM of this really compact 1008HA, I forgot to disconnect the internal battery. boom.
Comment by Thomas Tempelmann — November 5, 2010 @ 3:25 pm