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Author Topic: I Don't Do Windows  (Read 50738 times)

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Brentai

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #240 on: September 14, 2011, 07:49:43 AM »

Well if it IS supposed to be tablet-like, it only makes sense that they throw a nonsensical default UI at you to encourage you to buy a new one.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #241 on: October 14, 2011, 10:38:09 PM »

Welp, now that Ubuntu 11.10's out, it's time to reflect on 11.04.

11.04 was bullshit.

I've got my share of gripes about Unity, but I think the biggest problem with the switch is that it seems to have distracted the devs from maintaining everything else.  Even in sister release Kubuntu.  I don't even USE Unity, I've opted to stick with KDE, and my experience with 11.04 has been probably the worst I've had since I had to run a Windows wireless driver through a wrapper sometime back in 2007.

Every update was an opportunity for something to break.  On more than one occasion, all my icons disappeared.  And by "all my icons" I don't mean "all the icons on my desktop" or "all the icons in my panel", I mean ALL MY ICONS.  It's a good thing I'm used to navigating Firefox with my keyboard, because there were no Back or Forward buttons and no New Tab or Close Tab buttons.

Later, when I was installing something from command-line apt-get, it finished an already-in-progress update and my icons came back.  (So the second time it happened, I knew to try that!)

So, the GUI updater fucked up somewhere; it got as far as uninstalling old packages but didn't finish actually installing the upgrades.

At this point I'm about ready to throw that fucking GUI updater out, because not only does it not always work, about once a week it'll peg my CPU.

Not in any obvious way, of course.  It shoots dbus-daemon up to 100%.  For you Windows users out there, that's like if svchost is at 100%: you know some service somewhere is fucked up, but you can't figure out offhand which one it is, and probably don't remember what you need to run to find out.

I still don't remember the name of the specific process I need to kill to fix the problem; I just leave a Firefox tab open to a page that tells me.

And of course it's one of those things that doesn't immediately manifest itself in an obvious way.  The system doesn't visibly bog down, KDE just starts flaking out.  Like, I start a filecopy and the dialog never comes up.  So I figure maybe I misclicked, and try it again.  Still nothing.  So then I try restarting the file manager, and it takes a minute of the launcher refusing to actually launch anything for me to realize that dammit, it's happened again.

Or, similarly, I try to watch a video and it doesn't come up; try a couple times before realizing that yes the damn update notifier is the culprit.

I've also had multiple kernel updates where my graphics driver doesn't get properly reinstalled to load with the new kernel.  Which is another one of those easy fixes except I can never remember off the top of my head what the hell the nVidia graphics driver package is called and for some damn reason can never find it trivially with a Google search.

All in all, this is pretty trivial stuff.  But it's exactly the kind of trivial stuff that I switched to Ubuntu to AVOID.  This fucking distro used to be solid and friendly, and 11.04 is just a goddamn mess.

Now, I'm an optimist at heart, and think most of this boils down to 11.04 being a major change in direction for Ubuntu, and things being rough as a result of that.  11.10, then, should be the bugfix release that tamps down all the bullshit that's come up.  For that reason, I am looking forward to upgrading to it in the hopes that it will fix the various infuriating things 11.04 introduced.

But I sure am happy I have a laptop to test it out on before I try it on my desktop.

(Oh, one more great thing about KDE's update notifier?  It's popped up TWICE in the time it took me to write this post, to tell me a dist upgrade is available.  Unlike the now-standard Windows update nag screens, there is no "Don't remind me for another [n] minutes" option; it just fucking pops up every five minutes.  I am sure there is a way to disable it, but again, if I wanted to have to Google for solutions to things that should be goddamn obvious, I'd still be using Gentoo or Slackware.)
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #242 on: October 15, 2011, 04:05:49 PM »

Forgot to mention the part where I had to quit automounting samba shares because it would lock up my damn computer every time I clicked the K menu or opened a file dialog.

Anyway, the upgrade on my laptop hasn't hosed it.  I like the Unity sidebar rather less than last version (used to be it would only unhide by hovering in the upper-left corner; now it unhides when you put the mouse anywhere on the lefthand side EXCEPT the upper corner; the launcher takes up way more space now, Windows/KDE style, and autohide seems buggy), but there's nothing gamebreaking.

Granted, that's what I said LAST time I did an Ubuntu upgrade, and it turned out it ran fine on my laptop but not on my desktop.  But that was an alpha and this is a release.

Here goes.  If you don't see me for a couple days it's because the upgrade didn't take.

Or I'm just drunk or something.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #243 on: October 15, 2011, 08:38:18 PM »

Welp, update did not complete.  After one of my several reboots it mounted my root FS as RO, so that was pretty awesome.  At least this time it was fixed on reboot.  (Oh yeah, that's another thing I forgot to mention about the 11.04 upgrade.  THAT stuck my FS in RO too, only that time it took multiple reboots, multiple failsafe boots, and multiple fscks.  So at least that didn't happen this time!)

Now the upgrader exits with a vague and worthless error telling me that something somewhere is preventing the upgrade from working for some reason, probably, unless it's a bug.

Googling this completely vague and useless error shows I'm not the only one; that particular bug report suggests I can get around it if I disable ia32-libs.  Meaning I wouldn't be able to use Flash.  Come to think of it, the Flash plugin installer DID error out when I upgraded the laptop.

So, 11.04 it is for now.  I still hate Flash in general and Linux Flash in particular, but not enough to try to function without it.

Fortunately the "An upgrade is available!" nag appears to have gone away.
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Caithness

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #244 on: October 15, 2011, 08:46:13 PM »

I thought Linux had 64-bit Flash now.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #245 on: October 15, 2011, 10:15:06 PM »

It does, but it's not supported in the first-party Ubuntu repos and I'm leery of relying on a third-party repo just to make Oneiric work.  Plus, even if it did, I still wouldn't be able to use WINE, and even though it's not something I use on a regular basis I don't really want it broken either.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #246 on: October 24, 2011, 11:55:18 AM »

Also, on the annoying-but-not-game-breaking side of problems I've experienced with Kubuntu Natty: the system volume is broken.  If I hit the volume keys on my keyboard, a slider pops up and moves up or down, but...that's all that happens.  It does not actually adjust volume, it just moves the slider on a graphic.  Sure, I can still adjust volume on a per-program basis and by reaching up and twiddling with the knobs on my speakers, but it's irritating.

Anyway.  Still haven't upgraded to Oneiric on the desktop.  The bug page blames it on cups and says it's been fixed in a proposed package, but I've decided not to fuck around with enabling proposed packages.  I'll upgrade when it's a smooth process and not before.

Meanwhile, on my laptop (running Unity), I've been irritated to find that it gives me a password prompt coming out of sleep even though it's set not to, and also they've replaced the window-to-window Alt-Tab behavior with a Mac/GNOME 3 style Alt-Tab for programs/Alt-` for windows in same program (although a quick Alt-Tab, without waiting for the window list to come up, apparently moves you to your last window and not to a different program -- I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature).  It can apparently be reverted to the old behavior but I haven't had a chance to mess with it just yet; couldn't find the Compiz settings and didn't have time to hunt for them.

Ars has a review, focusing on Unity.

At this point I think I'll probably try another flavor of Linux next time I rebuild, though who knows when that'll be; I really don't want to go to the trouble to tear down my entire system right now.  I know Sora's a fan of Mint but it just looks butt-ugly from everything I've seen of it.  My uncle said he'd had a positive experience switching from Ubuntu to SUSE.  I dunno; I'm probably sticking with Ubuntu for the foreseeable future just because I don't have time to switch, but they really need to get their shit together if they want to keep me.

Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.
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Amuro Ray

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #247 on: October 24, 2011, 12:40:22 PM »

Mint is cool, but the updates always break it.  ::(:

#! (CrunchBang) is cool though, you should check that out.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #248 on: October 24, 2011, 01:41:06 PM »

Mint is cool, but the updates always break it.  ::(:

Well, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get AWAY from.

Not entirely surprising given that it's based on Ubuntu.
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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #249 on: October 24, 2011, 07:28:22 PM »

Meanwhile, on my laptop (running Unity), I've been irritated to find that it gives me a password prompt coming out of sleep even though it's set not to, and also they've replaced the window-to-window Alt-Tab behavior with a Mac/GNOME 3 style Alt-Tab for programs/Alt-` for windows in same program (although a quick Alt-Tab, without waiting for the window list to come up, apparently moves you to your last window and not to a different program -- I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature).  It can apparently be reverted to the old behavior but I haven't had a chance to mess with it just yet; couldn't find the Compiz settings and didn't have time to hunt for them.
I assume you already tried searching CCSM.

Ars has a review, focusing on Unity.
My first impression was that it looked pretty slick. The delay it imposed on alt+f2 launching was a total deal-breaker, for me.

At this point I think I'll probably try another flavor of Linux next time I rebuild, though who knows when that'll be; I really don't want to go to the trouble to tear down my entire system right now.  I know Sora's a fan of Mint but it just looks butt-ugly from everything I've seen of it.  My uncle said he'd had a positive experience switching from Ubuntu to SUSE.  I dunno; I'm probably sticking with Ubuntu for the foreseeable future just because I don't have time to switch, but they really need to get their shit together if they want to keep me.

Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.
I'm happy enough dicking around with 11.10, though I went over to Gnome-3 and AWN instead of Unity.

In case anyone's wondering about how to get desktop composition (and thus AWN themes) to work in Ubuntu 11.10, go into gconf->apps->metacity->general(?) and make sure "use compositor" is checked. I'm on a Win7 box and can't conveniently check, at present. Also, for whatever reason, I can't seem to get the Compiz cube going, even when flagging it in CCSM. I probably missed something.

Apparently alt+right click is used to adjust the Gnome panel settings, which is a change from Ubuntu 9.x's default of just right-click. This is probably a Gnome-3 vs Gnome-2.x thing, not an Ubuntu thing, but it had me scratching my head for a while.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #250 on: October 31, 2011, 11:58:16 AM »

More Oneiric irritation (on my laptop; still can't install it on my desktop): by default it's set to dim the screen after approximately 3 seconds of non-use.  Even if I'm watching a movie.

There appears to be absolutely no granular control over this "feature"; it's either on or off.  There does not appear to be any way to set it to something sensible like "Dim the screen after 5 minutes if I'm not playing a movie".

Also, the Emulate3Buttons option appears to have been removed, which is fucking irritating as my laptop only has two mouse buttons.
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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #251 on: October 31, 2011, 01:49:28 PM »

I take it it dims even in the face of things like VLC's "disable screensaver" option (Prefs → Advanced → Video)?

(Shot in the dark.)
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #252 on: November 01, 2011, 09:08:34 PM »

Also, ever since my router went down the other day the Oneiric machine has developed the irritating habit of prompting for a wireless password every single time I wake it up.  (The router is, as you might expect from the fact that I am writing this on the Internet, currently up.)
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #253 on: November 02, 2011, 08:22:53 AM »

Happy 20th birthday, vim!

I use vim pretty regularly but am very much not proficient with it; the most sophisticated thing I know how to do is yy.

(Stross has had a pretty fascinating series of posts on the value of vi recently; can't find them at the moment.  Notably, it's designed to run at-speed at 300 baud, which may not matter to most people anymore but is damn useful for somebody who's doing a transatlantic ssh session.  He's not an emacs guy, and suggests that emacs only makes sense if you're using a PDP10-style keyboard with Ctrl to the left of A.)
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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #254 on: November 02, 2011, 05:09:55 PM »

emacs only makes sense if you're using a PDP10-style keyboard with Ctrl to the left of A.
Not like Caps Lock functionality is worth a damn to begin with. May as well just remap it.
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Burrito Al Pastor

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #255 on: November 02, 2011, 06:43:57 PM »

Speaking of vim - there was a neat post via Daring Fireball about a fellow who gave up his macbook for an iPad, by (in part) SSHing to vim.
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sei

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #256 on: November 03, 2011, 05:54:36 PM »

Decided to give the latest version of Mint a shot and have been finding Compiz a lot more cooperative in it than Ubuntu 11.10.
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Dooly

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #257 on: November 04, 2011, 05:11:18 PM »

I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu on an old laptop of mine, and I've got 9.04 on a disc.  If I successfully install that, will it update itself to the latest stable version?
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #258 on: November 04, 2011, 10:17:50 PM »

I doubt you can do a straight upgrade from 9.04 to 11.10 -- that's 5 versions ago.

I'm not even really sure I can recommend Ubuntu without reservation at this point, but if you want to give it a shot I'd definitely recommend burning the latest version and starting from there.  (I'm tempted to suggest just going with 10.04 since that's the long-term support version from before they started shaking everything up, but you'd be stuck with some pretty damn outdated packages.)

Or possibly Mint.
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Thad

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Re: I Don't Do Windows
« Reply #259 on: November 09, 2011, 08:06:52 AM »

MS will let you jailbreak Windows Phone 7 for $9.

This is fucking brilliant, and I'm not being sarcastic.  Create a barrier to entry, but a small one, and you get a piece of the action from people who want to run third-party apps, make exploits a less attractive option, and straddle the line between Apple's walled garden and Google's free-for-all.

Well-played, MS.
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