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Just some random rants; Blender’s working, accelerated video is working: cool. Firefox (on 64bit) is fast as hell, Blender renderin speed much better and the desktop feels really snappy (even with the powersaving cpu governor). Now, some rants:

XFCE4: right now, I have no menu editor; I know they’re working on it, but it’s not that cool. Also I have two file manager icons on the control panel. They’re the same; not a big deal though.

KDE 4.3: pretty stable this time, still damn buggy. Internal composite manager is a waste; sometimes it dies, sometimes it kills xorg, sometimes it gave me a black screen, sometimes it slowed down… The panel gets corrupted even with no composite, the kashew icon has some broken text when moved around… and so on. Btw when can I have the gradient background option back?

Krusader: I’m a dual pane file manager fan; the user menu’s been fixed, many things have not been (like the action menu show/hide inversion). I fall back to Worker: still no antialiased fonts. Yikes! XFree86 calling from the nineties!

Logitech shiny-mice (mine is a cordless MX8): uses evdev, cool. I can “map” keyboard events to button presses, but can not assign a button event to many buttons at once (I like the middle button on the middle + thumb left + thumb right; it makes my fingers hurt less).

Wings 3D devel: from AUR… well, who cares? Probably because of evdev no mouse button clicks are picked up (or actually holding a mouse button). It’s pretty hard to do 3d without camera movements – and I’m puzzled here, because I really don’t want to fall back to the plain old xorg driver. I bought this mouse for the buttons (and to lessen joint pain in my fingers).

Wine: I’m on x86_64 and wine is not officially supported on 64 bit Arch. Should I fall back to AUR again or should I mess with chroot and schroot? Now I really don’t feel like doing either of those…

Virtualbox: hardware acceleration still buggy (yeah, I know it’s experimental) + only the left and the right mouse buttons work. Not a big problem, but still, it’s quite annoying with graphics software.

I remember roughly ten years ago, when a friend came by and upon attaching his hdd to my machine a nice Afterstep desktop booted up. It was in the Windows 95-98 era, where one couldn’t boot a Windows OS with a different motherboard (actually XP still sucks with this), so I really thought it was astonishing. Things “worked” – for some reason Linux was “stability”. Linux: as a server and, to be honest, as a very weak desktop – but even with the guy doing nearly everything on the command line, the lack of blue screens struck me.

Nowdays all I hear is that the desktop Linux is here (X is the year of the Linux desktop, where X is the current year) – and actually I just don’t think so. By forcing this very strong server system to behave like a desktop, it’s just loosing quality. Hard lockups, bad drivers, the stupid rants and quarrels about the binary blobs and all the brokan applications – it’s not what I saw a decade ago.

Just for fun, search for the word “segfault” on some of the Linux distributions I used and liked (number of results): Arch ~322, Ubuntu 250, Gentoo 183.

Debian community is so terrible, there’s not much point in using their forums in my opinion – what’s important is not these numbers, but the fact that others are experiencing these issues as well. I don’t care if it is an nvidia driver, a udev issue, a broken browser or whatnot, segfaults, lockups and the Magic SysRequest Bicycle Repairmen are all here to stay.

After trying out the new Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) in a Virtual Machine (and seeing all the same bugs I have seen before unfixed) I installed Xubuntu 32bit (for real) – I gave up on 64 bit anyway…
I like Xfce, because it’s pretty small and flexible (one can reuse the panel or the mcs-manager with other desktop manager parts), and at least its’ panels are not as terribly buggy as Gnome’s!

What I liked:

• the Xubu guys did a pretty good job at integrating Xfce into the Ubuntuish system (same layout, managed startup applications, good menu integration etc.) – I prefer to customize xfce’s every aspect, but it was nice.
• Internationalization works, foreign characters appear fine in xterm and assorted terminals, even under more exotic window managers (this is not that trivial).
  
• Xfce is fast as usual, has a small memory footprint.

What I didn’t like:

• The restricted driver install is still buggy, though if I click brainlessly it works.
• catfish, as the “default” search application; it’s just way too dumb for me (thanks for not saving the preferences and defaulting to the binary location); it would’ve been nice to add a freaking “search here” item in Thunar’s right click menu – at least we have a terminal opener…
• Default fstab setup sucks. No, I mean really. No ntfs drives in Thunar (okay, I can add them manually as usual), pcManFm automounting is broken (probably pmount and hal), and I really find the whole Gnome vfs idea annyoing (yep, have fun with Nautilus –no-desktop).
• Samba discovery is still broken, LinNeighborhood (ahem, pyNeighborhood or what) is buggy as hell and Gnome vfs / KDE kio systems are restricted to specific desktop environments (applications awaro of these systems). Adding samba shares manually and with my pingmount script as usual.
• No sudoers setup; not even wheel. Did I mention how I hate visudo?
  
• Xubu comes with Alsa (no Pulse-crap), but some applications are preconfigured for Pulseaudio (like Audacious for example).
• Smb shares can be mounted multiple times into the same directory (see mtab), though this is an smbmount bug (feature?) I guess. Still it’s sloppy, especially for it being here for 7 years.
  
• The shutdown process halts, because my Dlink NAS box did not answer for the CIFS logout/shutdown request. I can do magic sysrq, but since unmounting from the terminal works like a charm, this is crap.
• Compiz fun: after killing compiz it did not reset the wm to xfwvm4, but installed metacity; add the xfce-session behaviour to that and you have five minutes of headache (ten if you’re Joe Average having fun with OpenGl window management). By the way Compiz taskswitcher is a huge regression compared to Beryl, and no, restoring a simpler version is impossible.
  
• Just one small rant: why on Earth can’t I set the padding / menuitem height for Xfce menu? Even an oldskool bb menu looks nicer!
• Adobe flash (thanks, Adobe) still eats plenty of CPU (ate 50% for me with Youtube, which already triggers upscaling by the ondemand governor), though it’s not really Ubuntu specific.
• Grub uninstall still sucks (like dd-ing 512 bytes to a savefile is so hard).
• Java install in the add/remove items: we have OpenJDK (bad mojo for Tomcat and Eclipse stuff), but not the Sun official JRE; Firefox install plugin on the other hand suggests the Sun version. How come OSX has java preinstalled?
  
• No dual pane file management: Worker is raw, Emelfm2 is dumb, Krusader is unstable, TotalCommander perl wrapping is silly and so on… It’s good to see how a dumb Dolphin kicks the more advanced Konqueror around, not to mention how users had to whine for years for tabs in Nautilus.