Unfortunately, I no longer use Ubuntu MATE

Thoughts & Feedback
#7

Oops. Wrong version. You are correct though. Mint is based on Ubuntu 14.04. Will Mint get these bugs when they upgrade their Ubuntu Base? The bugs are outside of Ubuntu actually. They are, in some cases, caused by conflicts within several OSS communities.:fearful:

#8

While I don’t want to say in the slightest that the troubles anyone have don’t exist, I just wanted to add to the experiences:

Synapse: I had trouble in a previous version. I don’t remember if it was xubuntu or Ubuntu MATE 14.04 or 14.10 or… sorry, been too long. But after an update, it started working again (YAY) and has been stable for me with no problems.

Update manager: No problems here. Closest for me is that the Ubuntu Software Center runs glacially slow even on this mid-range not-too-bad desktop.

Panel layout: Only related problem I’ve ever had is that I saved my custom panel layout so I could switch things up and see what the options looked like - and when I went to restore my saved layout, it didn’t restore at all well. But I re-did my customizations and have been perfectly fine.

Wireless networking has worked without any problems for me at all.

So again, while I’m not arguing and saying you aren’t having these problems, I can say that Ubuntu MATE has been very good to me.

I’m sorry for your troubles. :frowning:

1 Like
#9

I am sorry for your troubles …

I have been using Fedora and Opensuse for quite a long time (everyday needs) and i am back to DEbian/Ubuntu based distributions, using several Ubuntu’flavors without experienced those big troubles.

As far as i remember, synapse was crashing at the very early 16.04 released, but until now it seems ok here on 3 computers (was easy to fix the problem but sorry ,cannot remember how, “google i” if you like)

Never had so arround, exept if a API key cannot be load, for instance i ha this with Spideroak One

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com sudo apt-get update 2>&1 | grep -o '[0-9A-Z]\{16\}$' | xargs
that a way to fix it, but it doesn’t seems to be what you have encounter and what you expecting .

No problem here, but yes with compiz enable strange things sometimes appear, but no big dill. It completely fine with others windows manager such as marco and marco/compton

That is a point ! Wifi goes out on laptop Lenovo Edge E330 when come back from suspend (lid close)
have to restart in command line… but that one maybe will go back Gnome :yum:

Strange … Joe Collins was so enthusiastic with the Beta version( really appreciate what his doing through his web site and youtube channel) and has he wrote, things gone after …

Why was I so upset? Simply this: ALL of this had WORKED flawlessly
when the machine was running Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Beta and now it didn’t
work at all! I tested it weeks before I even thought of buying the Dell
laptop to replace the HP. The idea of shifting the HP to desktop status
had been knocking around in my head for a while.
“So, what am I gonna do now?” I thought to myself.
Answer: “I’m gonna install Linux Mint 17.3!” Guess what, folks? It
worked perfectly, yet again, and I’m writing this text on it right now.
[http://freedompenguin.com/articles/opinion/linux-mint-saves-day/](http://1. Wireless networking is completely and utterly broken)
And yes linuxmint has a good way to go for stable (goes out when it’s ready) … let’s see if those problems appear with the 18 beta version who released yesterday, cause this is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and the 17.3, on 14.04 (14.04.4 ?, not sure)
http://freedompenguin.com/articles/opinion/linux-mint-saves-day/

#10

I hope Linux Mint 18 doesn’t inherit these bugs. Because Linux Mint doesn’t follow arbitrary release deadlines, they often have more time to ensure stability. If it does have these bugs, I might cling to Linux Mint 17.3 until the end of the support cycle (2019).

#11

Yes, I used Compiz with Ubuntu MATE, but that was to remedy another problem. Even with Marco + Compton, the VSync is completely broken, and I would see tearing scrolling down a webpage or watching a Youtube video. That’s just embarrassing for a distro in 2016. I use Compiz not for the fancy effects, but because it makes my computer feel like it has modern graphics hardware (which it does). In terms of compositing quality, Compiz comes closest to Wayland/Mir out of every other window manager I’ve tried (Mutter is very close to Compiz quality).

Think your window manager is up to the test? Perform these three tasks. All of them should have smooth graphics. No artifacts as an object is moving, no horizontal lines should appear on the screen, all graphical elements should remain intact while they are moving.

  1. Drag a window slowly across the screen
    2)Watch this video, fullscreen and in the Firefox window.
  2. Scroll backwards and forwards (try different speeds, too) on a long, text-heavy webpage in Firefox like this one.

Keep note that these are not arbitrary benchmarks, these are representative of real life tasks. Windows, Mac OS X have been able to pass these tasks for years. Until Wayland becomes useful to me, I will be using Compiz.

#12

I have not experienced any of these difficulties on my Dell Laptop.

*Wireless works perfectly [99% of my online activity is WIFI]
*Manually update and plan to do so until first point release
*Using the tweak tool has proven superior for me
*Top panel is hidden to provide more visible screen
*Bottom panel completely removed and replaced by Plank

Ubuntu MATE is my choice!

#13

Linux Mint uses an older kernel (3.19). What would happen if you installed that kernel in MATE?

Could you please tell me your hardware specs? Because I would like to know what graphics card you use? What CPU? etc.

You could dual boot MATE with Mint, so you can have a working daily driver and MATE to test and post bug reports when needed. If the developers do not get report they can’t solve the issue.

You could try again after July 21st, that is the scheduled release of 16.04.1. It should solve a lot of issues. Then do not install it as the sole OS on your system, but on another partition.

I think it a bit harsh to say that it is the fault of Canonical, the maintainers of Synapse, Network-manager and so on do not work for Canonical, they work for other projects.

We do try and report bugs to the different projects, but we do not have every version of hardware there is so we need your input.

1 Like
#14

It’s funny how it goes sometimes - there seems to be lots of bugs in Ubuntu 16.04… none of them affect me :wink:

I’ve used Ubuntu Mate 16.04 since beta on my main Laptop - apart from the occasional crash of the document viewer, nothing affects my workflow. I’ve sorted every minor problem with a bit of googling (eg. no wifi after resume… easy fix found - brightness at max after resume… easy fix found - gvfs/gvfsd-smb-browse high CPU usage… easy fix found ). Although TBF many “problems” are just down to my hardware, not down to Ubuntu.

Anyway, all OK here… oh, and Ubuntu Mate and Linux Mint are the only two distros that work for me… and I’ve tried them all over the years

Chris

1 Like
#15

I haven’t encountered any of these bugs on the systems I’ve run Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on (not even the wireless problems - it worked fine with a RaLink-based USB WiFi adapter), though especially on the latter I’ve seen a lot of reports so far.

Screen tearing for me was fixed by using either Compton or an option in nvidia-settings, but that’s of course GPU/driver-specific.

Personally the most annoying issue I came across so far is that Caja gets utterly confused by media which can be both read/write and read-only (like SD cards which have that little lock slider).
If you mount an SD card for the first time in read-only mode, Caja thinks it will remain that way forever (on a per-user basis) and next time I mount it with the lock slider in read/write position, Caja complains that the device is read-only when I e.g. want to copy something onto there.

The bug report is here, if anyone wants to add something to it.

1 Like
#16

For composition I prefer to use compton, it is light and by default works out of the box without tearing and no fancy effects. Yeah, I like Compiz but indeed it is not the best choice and I saw some bugginess but nothing too drastic.

The Wifi issues are real, after first install and after resume, I blame network manager as I saw the same happening on Arch. I also saw the occasional brightness issues after resume but other than that everything else is mostly great.

I really cannot complain about Ubuntu Mate 16.04. I had more problems with the main Unity version.

I would go with some of wizd3m’s suggestions, especially determining the hardware specs and graphics card.

#17

I don’t know what would happen. I don’t suspect it would fix my Wi-Fi problems because I suspect that NetworkManager has a role to play in my problems too.[quote=“wizd3m, post:13, topic:6712”]
think it a bit harsh to say that it is the fault of Canonical, the maintainers of Synapse, Network-manager and so on do not work for Canonical, they work for other projects.
[/quote]

If you read my post, Synapse was segfaulting because of IBus. I managed to fix it by changing some configuration. I have not had this problem on other distros. It is Canonical’s fault for shipping a broken version of NetworkManager.

Sure, I’ve truncated the output from sysinfo to include the information that I think is relevant:

Oh, and just to be clear I have the problems with Compton in Linux Mint as well. Only Compiz, Kwin, or Mutter-based window managers get VSync right.

#18

@ChrisK I’d be interested in the details of thos fixes you’ve found to see if upstream can be patched :slight_smile:️

1 Like
#19

Hi @Wimpy
Quick question:
It seems to me that a lot of driver related problems (especially network drivers) are often easily solved by dropping a one-line file in /etc/modprobe.d/${driver}.conf.
Is there a technical reason why those common solutions aren’t deployed by default in a new installation?

Cheers

#20

I’ve got Ubuntu-MATE on three systems. An Dell Dimension 9150 desktop, a Dell Studio 1745 laptop, and a Acer Aspire One D-150 Netbook. And on all three of them, the only problem is the Network one. Can’t tell it on the first one, because it’s Ethernet only, no Wireless card, so it doesn’t count. :wink: The Dell laptop uses an Intel WiFi card, Intel WiFi Link 5100 using the iwlwifi driver, while the acer uses an Qualcomm Atheros AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter with the ath5k driver.

Now if I put UM 15.10 on both laptop & netbook, they both work fine, put 16.04 of any Ubuntu based Distro (Ubuntu,Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Lite 3.0 and our Ubuntu-MATE) on either one, and the WiFi breaks. :frowning:

I’m just hoping the next 16.04 point release has the fix included! Or if it’s a bug in the current Kernel, a patched one available for download.

#21

Thats really interesting as my Dell Studio 1749 uses a different card and has perfect wifi and ethernet connectivity

Network:   Card-1: Broadcom BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n driver: wl
           Card-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169
#22

Yep, that is weird. Usually I have no problems with Intel stuff. The Intel video works like a champ though.

At least I had fun with a marathon of Distro installs. :wink: Since Ethernet works on all, I just keep the Laptop plugged into an extra Ethernet jack for Internet use. :wink:

1 Like
#23

I’ll PM you the “fixes”, Martin

EDIT: I can’t find a way to PM on this forum, but I’m not awake yet… I’ll just paste it here:

The “fixes” are perhaps better described as workarounds, but I was trying for a positive post to balance the negative ones :wink:

However… here’s the brightness and wifi/network fix:

Paste the following code into a script and place in /lib/systemd/system-sleep and do “sudo chmod a+x /lib/systemd/system-sleep/your-script” to make executable:

#!/bin/sh
case $1/$2 in
  pre/*)
    #echo "Going to $2..."
    exit 0
    ;;
  post/*)
    #echo "Waking up from $2..."
    # Place your post suspend (resume) commands here, or `exit 0` if no post suspend action required
    echo 35 > /sys/class/backlight/nv_backlight/brightness
    service network-manager restart
    ;;
esac

Obviously the brightness fix is machine/driver specific, so needs editing for each machine, or changed programatically

The high cpu is only a stop-gap until a fix is found:

just disable the execution

sudo chmod 744 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-smb-browse

Chris

#24

Hi @foxinsocks,

not to pick holes in your statement above but isn't Linux Mint based on Ubuntu?. :confused:

One of the main problems causing errors in the system is that people don't follow a few basic guidelines when creating their boot media and during the installation which I am sure you are well aware of!, I will put them below for the benefit of any beginners looking at this thread:

1: Always burn disks at the slowest possible speed to avoid read/write errors to the disk which will eventually lead to post install problems.

2: Always pre-format the USB stick to FAT32 prior to creating a image on the stick (for the same reasons as stated at #1 above).

3: Always install updates during installation which ensures that the latest updates install with the system and requires only a few more updates upon full installation completion.

4: Use the Welcome App to help with any post install fixes.

Welcome > Software > Fixes

Pasted image1920×1028 130 KB

4 Likes
#25

The point is, the current version of Linux Mint is based on 14.04. from what I understand. Secondly, many of the kinds of problems listed in this thread are underlying and system related and clearly not due to some particular error in download. That is not to say that errors cannot arise from the things you have just mentioned. But, they are not especially relevant, I would argue, to what has been discussed here.

2 Likes
#26

If compton does vsync wrong you should try to run it manually with:

compton -b --backend glx

You can also try some other options.

For more info read:

or have a look into compton’s manpage.

I know it sounds like additional work but I just try to point out some solutions.