Re: [LUG] I've had it with Ubuntu

[bad apple <ifindthatinteresting@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/11/12 09:08, tom wrote:
> Yesterday my machine updated a few packages and now it wont even run
> unity any-more.
> I have three machines with 12.04 on and they are all borked one way or
> another - mostly OpenGL is totally screwed (they're all Nvidia).
> I normally use XFCE destop but occasionally drop into Unity to try and
> sort out printing and fileshareing which has also gone completely tits
> up as the 'upgrade' overwrote configs in a 'secure' way and then hid
> the mechanism for fixing it in case it scares the user.
> I have no idea what Unity was meant to achieve for someone who
> actually uses a computer to compute and not just as an interface to
> the net but its so badly screwed I'm going to completely get rid of it
> and move to xubuntu unless anyone else is having similar problems with
> that.
> Tom te tom te tom te tom
>
>

Argh, I've just hit exactly the same point as you... spent half the
afternoon in the guts of my workstation stuffing in yet another disk and
re-cabling everything and am now sat here despondently wondering just
how long it's going to take me to wipe Ubuntu 12.10 off my SSD and then
migrate my enormous working data sets back into place. Custom scripts,
kernels, self-compiled packages and a big handful of proprietary
packages (VMWare, CAD, Intel compiler, etc) that I'm going to have to
dig out all the serial codes and registration details for. *groan*

The final straw came just after booting back up - since upgrading to
12.10 a couple of weeks back my system is just not in a happy place. My
desktop icons are hidden for some incomprehensible reason when I log in,
so I have to fire up gnome-tweak-tool (which is itself not installed by
default - why?), find "Have the file manager manage my desktop" which is
bloody well turned to "on" already, turn it off and then back on again:
behold, desktop icons! Every damn time I login I have to do this. All of
the useful Gnome3 plugins aren't compatible with the latest 3.6 version
included in 12.10 so my desktop isn't really a nice place to be working
on anymore: the auto-placement plugin that automatically opens my slew
of standard programs and sticks them into the correctly labelled
workspace also doesn't work anymore so I have to manually put
thunderbird, firefox, qbittorrent, several terminals, virtualbox and so
on where I want them. If I accidentally shut a program Gnome3
'helpfully' collapses that workspace and re-shuffles everything.
Infuriating. This happens more than it should because 12.10 is such a
state that it will occasionally crash out even my most stable programs
sometimes.

The final insult came when I fired up gparted to check all my disks were
alive and kicking after the re-cabling, or at least tried to: hit the
'super' key and type gparted, get the automatic gksudo GUI dialogue pop
up to authenticate, and it flickers a yellow warning text for about half
a second ("can't complete the operation") and then dies. Typing "gksudo
gparted &" in a terminal launches the program perfectly, as expected.
Run "ps -ewaf | grep gparted" and there are 3 instances now running, 2
zombied (I had tried the GUI style launch twice). WTF? Check /var/log
for the offending message, and there is *nothing* there. What the hell
Ubuntu, what the hell. Adding in the fact that once again, getting
VMWare 9 running on this box required a third-party module fix script
AGAIN and I had to boot from a live media and chroot in to my system
because otherwise Ubuntu screwed up stopping the VMWare auth services
and broke the installer, the latest Nvidia drivers won't build properly
against my 3.7 kernel... the list goes on and on and on. I have had
nothing but bad experiences from 12.10 so far and I've had enough - I've
got damn work to do here.

Admittedly, part of my woes do come from my unusually high expectations
of an OS - admittedly, I really, really push my system but it's been
years since I've had this kind of antagonism from a linux box. Ubuntu
just seems to do what it wants, rather than what I'm telling it to do.
Some of the screw ups are VMWare's fault, some are Gnome3's but I don't
have most of these problems on the several parallel distros I'm running
on other machines and VMs. My bleeding edge Arch and Gentoo VMs are also
both running even more up to date Gnome3 DE's with full 3D under
virtualisation and they're fine... Oh yes, and about 1 in 5 times, if
I'm away from my machine for 30+ minutes and the screensaver kicks in,
the desktop stops responding: I can see it, and even scroll between
workspaces but I can't interact with it using the mouse or type into any
program. Ubuntu has of course also broken the CTRL+ALT+Fx to drop to a
different TTY as well: last night this happened, and I had to SSH in
from my iPhone and "sudo service lightdm restart" which did get me back
to a functional login screen but also nuked my entire work session. 'Cos
I was halfway through a massive kernel build at the time which I didn't
want to interrupt, I ended up sitting in front of a trashed desktop
session for 15 minutes before I could send the restart command from my
phone.

Oh yes, mplayer2 from git won't build properly (it runs, but fails to
enable many of the options I need like damn 10bit support) and my second
network card randomly triggers an IRQ polling interrupt every now and
then which I just can not track down no matter what I do - I had to pull
the card which has stopped the kernel module crashing out but I *really*
need that card in to access my secondary network - half of my 'real',
working machines are on it, like the mail and RAID boxes, y'know, the
ones that I actually need to run a business, make money and pay my bills
with.

So, I'm switching, and really I'm going to have to bite the bullet and
do it tonight, which I am not looking forward to. As for the distro, I'm
really not sure: if I spend too long thinking about it, I'm going to
just take my own advice and go Debian Testing but I'm really tempted to
do my first physical Mint install (can't decide between the Ubuntu and
Debian flavours though, and I don't like Cinnamon or Mate much as DEs).
I'm not running Gentoo because it's a massive pain in the ass, although
quite rewarding when it's behaving itself - even with a hex-core i7,
16Gb RAM and a SSD recompiling half of my system every day winds even me
up. Arch is nice, but they've been all over the place recently and keep
breaking rather fundamental package behaviour (and the mailing lists are
full of superior assholes). I've got a nice Windows 7/8 laptop for work
but I can't seriously use that on my main workstation - cygwin and
hyper-v (now much improved, but it's no KVM/XEN). In older days, I used
a Sun Ultra 60 with Solaris as my main workstation and absolutely loved
it but, well, Oracle. That's out. I do have a dark horse in the running,
which I'm leaning towards - Scientific Linux. It's like CentOS, but not
hopelessly outdated and crippled by political in-fighting. It's also a
RedHat derivative and whilst I don't generally like RPM based systems as
much as Apt/Dpkg, I spend most of my working life on RedHat/CentOS boxes
so I know them inside out and it would be helpful for compatibility with
several projects I'm working on. But it would require me re-factoring a
lot of my current build chains. *groan*

Anyway, TLDR version: I hate Ubuntu with a vengeance now, and it's being
permanently relegated to VMs until Shuttleworth pulls his head out of
his arse and stops ruining what was once the default choice for a linux
machine. Now I have to face the enormity of an entire system rebuild one
way or the other so I better get to it. Wish me luck!

Regards


Oh, and directly for Tom: I don't know what Nvidia hardware you're
using, but yes, their drivers have been a bit dodgy recently. Rather
than using the Ubuntu versions from the repo, have you tried purging
them and manually installing the version direct from Nvidia? There's a
new beta build that has radically improved performance and multiple bug
fixes: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-310.14-driver.
It's a bit of a pain to install (you'll have to reboot into init 1,
remount / as rw and then install, don't forget to install dkms first)
but I have to use it as my 3.7 kernel won't let the Ubuntu Nvidia
drivers link against it and so far, no problems. I have a 8800 GTX for
what it's worth.

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