18.04 Release response

Hi @rbeltz48,

my version is running like a Rolls Royce, what is buggy with your version?, the only problem I am having is with My Weather Indicator but that is not Ubuntu Mate’s fault!. :smiley:

This thread seems to be dedicated to MATE, but concerning Kubuntu 18.04, I agree with Dedoimedo dot com’s review concerning Balooctl (Baloo kf5) locking up the PC.

Upon initial reboot from a clean install one should immediately open a terminal and issue a “balooctl disable” command. Or edit ~/.config/baloofilerc and change IndexingEnable to false. I also did /usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kf5-settings/baloofilerc “only basic indexing = false”.

Upon initial boot from a fresh install one may want to Menu -> System Settings -> Power Management -> Energy Management -> Button Events Handling -> set to shutdown.

If Balooctl hangs the system the only way to reboot the system will be to depress the power button for over 4 seconds. This will do a hard shutdown and cause a crash, which one will not be able to recover from on reboot since the Grub Recovery tools will hang, forcing one to do a hard shutdown again, and the Recovery will never complete because it is trying to send the kernel crash to Ubuntu. If set to “Shutdown,” instead of “Do Nothing,” when the power button is depressed, but not held in, a soft shutdown will be done and then one can get to command prompt to issue the balooctl disable command and then normal booting can resume.

I had two different PCs lock up on me, one which had to have the OS re-installed from scratch and one that recovered.

Why isn’t Baloo listed in the Menu -> System Settings -> Workspace -> Startup & Shutdown -> Background Services? IIRC, one other KDE distro does list it? (Or was that MATE?)

It would have been nice to be able to re-install the OS without having to format the disk drive, either / and /home, as some other distros allow. But at least I didn’t have to disable kwallet so as not to get a monitor lockup when walking away from the PC when it is doing updates.

I loved the Kubuntu blue kde clog/gear icon.

This is the only way, and most people do need instructions, and these are good ones.

Okay, so I did a clean install of 18.04, just to test my theory that my old home folder had become messed up by Aptik restore, and this was the cause of my problems. Wrong!

Cron is still broken – ‘Permission denied’ error. (No solution found here, or elsewhere.) Fingerprint login is still broken. Compiz is still broken – no animations, effects. If I un-expand the panel on display0 the desktop icons move – the left column to the middle of display0 and the right column to the middle of display1. Also, menus on display0 appear way over to the right – if I click on the menu icon on the left edge of the panel the menu pops up at the right edge of the panel. Window grab handles are still too small — what is it, 1 pixel to each side?! sheesh

Caja and Eye of Mate so far seem to be improved. Automatic mounting of Samba shares is still not possible. My critical Wine apps work fine. Firefox and Thunderbird picked up the saved state from their old dot folders. So, I can live with it, but the experience is quite far below the 16.04 level. I’ll wait to see if wineasio gets fixed, and how .1 turns out.

I think widespread adoption of the Linux desktop is a pipe dream. It is never going to happen unless a major OEM decides to ship it factory installed. It will cost them quite a bit to deliver an experience in the same ballpark as Windows or Mac, and it will end up being a fork they will have to maintain fully. It’s not going to happen. The first time an end user has to type in a terminal, he will be like, “WTH! what is is this, 1985?” :slight_smile:

If the Mate team is small, and time limited I suggest simplifying the mission. The classic Gnome 2 UI, that’s it. Make changes to it SLOWLY. Small improvements—they have to be slam dunk improvements, not just different—matured and tested thoroughly before being pushed through to the LTS. Changes should be accompanied by plain English explanations, images and a switch for changing the default that shows up in the Welcome. User should always have an EASY way to reject the change and stick with the traditional UI. Instead of copied things from the Windows UI, let’s have FUNCTIONS that Windows has had for a long time—migration tool to analyze and preserve a custom home folder, and automatic mounting of Samba shares are two I can think of right away.

Plain English, please. For example, “GTK+ Bookmarks” — “What the heck is GTK+?” :slight_smile: Proper English, please. For example, ‘Global Application Menu’ has the comment “All menus will hosts here” — what does that even mean??? And then I also have ‘Brisk Menu’, ‘Main Menu’, ‘Mate Menu’, ‘Menu Bar’ — none of them has a useful comment explaining what it is. (“An applet…” not “A applet…”) The end user has to go through trial and error to find what he wants—I have still not found the old fashioned Gnome 2 version. Here is what I suggest — have ONE item called ‘Menus’, then when I choose it pop up a dialog with pictures of the different styles of menus, and radio buttons.

Rinse and repeat, for ‘Window Buttons Applet’, ‘Window List’, ‘Window Menu Applet’, ‘Window Picker’, ‘Window Selector’, ‘Window Title Applet’. I have not created a Ubuntu One account yet, so this the best I can do for now by way of feedback—use it, or don’t, it’s up to you.

Thank you for your patience!

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Weather Report indicator working fine for me. You are speaking of something other than the Panel applet presumably.

After a reboot which I did to load sample rate changes in pulse, I got a black screen, although the mouse cursor was there. A hard reboot from there and eureka! Compiz is working now. :slight_smile: So, check that one off.

If you have problems and you are just yelling on the forum and not reporting on launchpad , it’s pointless.

If there is such a thing as ‘Quality Assurance Tester’ shouldn’t it be easy to compile the user feedback from the forum and send it to the proper place? Linux is not my life.

A QA tester will thest the OS on they’re pc. But every pc is different and that’s why if i test something i can have a problem and the user maybe has another one.
Why a tester will not use a forum? Because we don’t know what specifications you have on your pc, what apps you did instaled that may conflict and so on and the most important is that we all have jobs, family etc and what we are doing we are doing in our spare time with what resources we have on hand. Don’t forget we don’t get paid and that’s why we need a job and we can’t do 8 hours per day testing. Ex: if you have a specific car problem you will go to the repair shop not your wife if she doesn’t know the problem. Because you can explain much better the problem then her.

I sent the Telemetry report. I always send crash reports when prompted. I have created a UbuntuOne account. If you would be so kind as to post the link to the bug reporting page, I’ll spend part of my Sunday doing it. I see no link on the U1 page.

you should use bugs.launchpad.net

First read this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

And this is the ubuntu mate bug tracker where you see if someone repoted the problems and where you fill the bug report/problems.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate

P.S almost all the QA team from Ubuntu Mate are day to day users that made bug reports periodically not developers, linux guru etc , just normal users like you.
Thanks for helping the project, if you have other questions give me a heads up using the private chat.

Thank you. I don’t think we should mistake ourselves to be “normal users”. People who are comfortable typing in the CLI daily, and doing sudo daily are not “normal” in 2018. For today’s “normal” user the Linux desktop is unusable. :slight_smile:

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Okay, 4 bug reports made. I will do feature requests, and UI suggestions another time.

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Could you please link the bugs here in case other people want to comment / mark themselves as affected?

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Sure thing.

Cron failure - https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/1773660

Fingerprint login failure - https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/1773662

Desktop icon position instability - https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/1773664

Caja hanging - https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider/+bug/1773670

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Thanks a lot, though for some reason all the bugs were filed against the “canonical-identity-provider” project. I switched them over to more appropriate locations.

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Thank you, maximuscore! I am a rookie at this.

No problem, we all have to start somewhere. :slight_smile: You should also add the version of UM and the package in question (e.g. cron, fprintd, caja, …) via apt show PACKAGENAMNE|grep Version.

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FYI, here is another visual regression vs. 16.04 I came across - the Dock icon for Descent 1 / 2 (from dxx-rebirth) is a generic icon instead of the one from the application menu:


If anyone else can confirm this, please add yourself to affected people in the bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mate-dock-applet/+bug/1767655