Is It Time To Abandon Ubuntu?
Side note to my regular readers: this post is full of technical mumbo jumbo. It’s not what I usually write, so feel free to skip it if you like. I will not be offended.
Recently I upgraded a computer from Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS to version 22.04. I wish it had gone smoothly. In the past I have upgraded without problems, but this did not go well.
Canonical — the makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution — have made some… controversial… decisions about their Linux distribution in recent years. Consider at least the following: systemd, Wayland, SNAP, and Unity.
Those are all places where Canonical experienced backlash. I’m not an expert on any of those things, but I can tell you that each raised cries of protest from parts of the Linux community:
- I mostly ignored the issues around systemd. It seemed likely those claiming it would cause apocalyptic issues were exaggerating, and so far that seems to have been the case. But it was — and probably remains — a point of contention with some.
- SNAP as a container format is amusing, but clearly has some rough edges even today. More about it below.
- Wayland is an unknown to me, but as you will read shortly, it also comes up in relation to issues I am seeing.
- In previous releases I experienced some minor issues with Unity, but it’s gone now. Done deal. Canonical abandoned it for GNOME 3, but they modify GNOME to make it look familiar to existing Ubuntu users. GNOME itself seems to cause at least people to get hot under the collar. Given my experience with it in 22.04, I understand some of why that is the case.
I mention the above to put the title in context. I am not sure Canonical has a cohesive direction in mind anymore, and what they are doing may not make sense. Combine those concerns with my upgrade experience and perhaps it is time to move on. Consider:
The actual upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04 was basically smooth. There was a point where it sort of hung. Twice I was prompted asking if I wanted to wait for the upgrade program or terminate it. Both times I told it to wait and things resumed. The needed packages were downloaded, installed, and configured without other issues. All good. If only it stayed that way.
Like most users these days I spend much of my time in a web browser, and I use Firefox for just about everything. Chrome is installed but only gets launched when a site misbehaves in Firefox, which is — thankfully — rare.
I could write an entire post about Google, Chrome, Manifest V3, and how they drove me back to Firefox a while ago. For those not in the know, it’s related to Google doing its very best to kill ad blocking. It is an advertising company, after all. You should strongly consider switching to Firefox if you like ad blockers because they are going to be substantially less useful pretty soon in Chrome, and in other browsers descended from the same code base. It’s bad.
But I digress. Back to my Ubuntu issues.
Firefox Issue 1: Black Screen on Launch
Once the upgrade claimed to be done, and after rebooting the OS, logging in, and clicking on the Firefox icon, I got a slow launch that produced only a black screen. The window was up and maximized, the window controls in the upper right corner were present, but the screen was black. My home page was not loaded. If fact, nothing was loaded. I stared at inky blackness and pondered.
The only obvious thing I could do was exit Firefox and try it again, which — oddly — worked correctly this time. It came up in the usual way and loaded my home page as if nothing was wrong.
If that had been a one time thing, fine. But for various reasons I shut my computer down every night. In the morning I power it back up and that means every morning I relaunch Firefox. My experience is that just under 50% of the time Firefox fails to launch properly in Ubuntu 22.04, resulting in an unresponsive black screen. In all cases where that happened simply exiting and restarting corrected the issue.
The best I could find with a few internet searches suggests this issue could be related either to Ubuntu’s use of Wayland or to the SNAP package they now ship Firefox in. Perhaps both things are involved. I’m no expert.
Wayland is clearly the center of a large scale flame war. One group says Wayland is not ready and that there are numerous issues related to it. Their easy suggestion is to logout and log back in with X instead of Wayland, which is an option on the Ubuntu login screen. (But it begs the question: why is that option even there if Wayland is ready for prime time?) Their other suggested “fix” is to abandon Ubuntu and install a distribution that doesn’t use Wayland. A different opinion says Wayland is fine and this is all overblown. A third group seems to think that SNAP packages may not cooperate well with Wayland, or perhaps it’s just the Firefox package that doesn’t do so. It’s all over my head and I gave up trying to figure it out. The various posts were full of too much highly charged, religious language.
I did try the X alternative once, and it worked, but the default (Wayland based) system sometimes works as well. I have things I need to do. I am not here to debug the system, and I am not expert enough to be able to do so. So I simply lived with Wayland and this problem for a while.
As I say, a bit under 50% of the time Firefox would fail to launch properly and I would have to exit and restart. At least it was relatively quick.
Firefox Issue 2: Launch Speed
I have to say “relatively quick” above because launching Firefox is not exactly a speedy process under Ubuntu. This goes back to at least 20.04 and perhaps earlier, and it definitely predates the SNAP package default.
When you launch Firefox there is a long period where it is pretty much unresponsive. My home page is a locally hosted HTML file full of links I regularly use. That page loads quickly, but if I click on any link in it — say to go to my gmail account — that browser tab will sit and spin for 15 or 20 seconds doing nothing (at least as far as I can tell). Eventually it will load the requested page, but then again eventually I will die of boredom.
To be clear, this happened with Firefox in 20.04, before the upgrade. Thus it predates the SNAP package distribution of Firefox and so it is probably related to the way Firefox works or loads, but it is annoying. Once it finishes whatever startup work it is doing, pages load reasonably quickly. And — amusingly — if I close Firefox and restart it, pages loads more quickly in the newly started browser than in the first copy of Firefox launched after a reboot. That might imply Firefox loads some code that stays resident in memory, making subsequent launches faster. Or perhaps it’s simply that all the data needed is now cached in memory. Again, I am not an expert at this.
This delay is annoying — to be sure — but it is perhaps made a bit worse by SNAP. There has been a lot of online discussion about SNAP packages being slow to load, particularly the Firefox package Ubuntu has made the default in 22.04. I can’t say I see that much of a difference between loading the native Firefox and the SNAP package version — such delays are completely hidden by Firefox’s own usability delay — but at least one or two updates have been made to SNAP to improve load times. And later launches of the SNAP Firefox package don’t seem hideously slow.
But Firefox is slow to load, regardless, and it’s not fun. If SNAP is making it worse, that is not good.
Firefox Issue 3: Forgetting It Is The Default Browser
You read that right. Perhaps every third time I launch Firefox it asks me if I want to make it my default browser. I answer “yes” and it goes on, but a day or three later it will ask me the same question again. I have no clue why, but it kept happening. And this is definitely new with 22.04. I have no resolution for this.
Firefox Issue 4: Hangs
This is the worst problem, and it is definitely new with 22.04.
After getting Firefox to launch successfully in the morning I go off into my usual routine: handle email, check my calendar, review my RSS feed, read some specific sites I use each day, catch up on the news, etc. Somewhere in that routine — every day without fail — Firefox hangs. It’s an odd hang, though. The contents of individual tabs become unresponsive to the mouse and keyboard, but the tabs themselves are not quite dead. If I click on the ‘x’ to close a tab, it appears nothing happens, but if I change the focus to some other application and then focus back on Firefox that tab disappears. I can repeat this process to shut down all the tabs individually, and I think the ‘x’ in the upper right corner worked to let me exit the entire application, but all of the internals of each tab were dead. Input to them was ignored.
This was crippling, and it happened every morning.
Weirdly, though, once I shut down the hung Firefox process and restarted it, the new one worked just fine for the rest of the day. I never once saw it hang like that again. That could just be dumb luck, but it was consistent. Next morning after a cold reboot, the hang was back.
This was the issue that finally caused me to decide I had to do something drastic.
The Firefox Fix?
I did some googling and found a page that discussed how to uninstall the SNAP package version of Firefox and go back to the old style .deb package version.
It’s not all that difficult, but it’s not exactly straightforward. You have to remove the SNAP package, add the PPA (repository) back into the supported repository list, and add a file containing commands that cause Ubuntu to prefer the .deb package version over the SNAP package version. It takes a few minutes and half a dozen commands run as root to make the change.
So far this has fixed nearly everything with Firefox. It did ask me once to make it the default browser, and the long delay before it will load the first page from the internet is still present, but otherwise it has worked flawlessly. I’ve had no hangs and no launches to a black screen since I made this change.
Alas that does not mean I have a clue what the underlying problems are. They might be related to SNAP packaging, or to Wayland, or something else, but whatever the situation, it appears the default way Ubuntu ships Firefox in 22.04 is completely unacceptable.
It also appears that Ubuntu’s testing of 22.04 was incomplete. My hardware is old but it works just fine, and nothing in my usage pattern is particularly unusual. How they missed these problems I really don’t know.
If that was it — if the system worked well now — I would probably be content and get on with life. But sadly that is not the end of my list of concerns.
The least pressing other item is still related to Firefox. I’ve read that at some point it will not be possible to override the SNAP package for Firefox. That worries me, but I can change distributions later if that happens and these problems remain. So that issue is deferred for now. But…
GNOME, What Are You Doing?
I am far from a GNOME power user, but even in my daily use I have noted a couple of issues that make me think the GNOME developers (or the Canonical developers tweaking GNOME for their Linux distribution) are making mistakes.
GNOME Issue 1: The File Selection Dialog
Say you’re writing a story here in Medium and you want to insert an image. You have a JPG file on your local hard disk that you want to use, so you click on the image insertion button and up pops a dialog box in which you are supposed to select the file desired.
In Ubuntu 20.04, the file selection dialog had a nice touch: when you clicked on an image file it showed you a thumbnail of the image so you could see if it was the one you wanted. That’s gone now. If you have 300 JPG files in the chosen folder you had better know the exact name of the one you want because you cannot click on them to see what they look like.
That is just one of three usability issues that I have encountered.
The second is that by default folders are not sorted above files. That’s different from how things were sorted in this same dialog in 20.04, and it confused me at first. Turns out there is a way to sort folders first, but doing so requires right clicking on any random file appearing in the dialog, and choosing the option to change the sort order from the context sensitive menu that pops up. Huh? That makes it look like that sort order option is related to a specific file, and it is definitely NOT where I went looking for it. I had to do some internet searches to learn how to make that change.
Thankfully the fix is sticky, so I only had to do it once. But I don’t understand why they buried the option where they did. It’s entirely and objectively wrong.
The final issue is that the new dialog simply doesn’t show as many files at a time. As a result it requires more scrolling to find the file you want. This is a usability hit that might not seem like a big deal, but it shows a lack of concern for the user. I find myself in that dialog all the time, and extra seconds spent hunting for files add up.
In researching these things I discovered that others have noted at least one other serious drawback to the GNOME file selection dialog that I haven’t yet encountered. If a directory contains many files, it is possible to cause the selection of a file to be mishandled in a specific way. This problem has been known for years and no fix has been made.
Collectively these issues show a serious lack of concern for how real world users interact with the GNOME software.
GNOME Issue 2: The Mystery of Changing Icons
Another one I don’t understand. It was a couple of days after I had upgraded. Other than Firefox I was reasonably happy. Then the icons used in the panel (for the various apps that appear there) changed. Well, not all of them changed. A few kept the same icons, but most got new ones.
Perhaps the change was related to a software update that was automatically applied? It came out of nowhere though, and I had to figure out what the new icons were. And some of them are, shall we say, less than obvious.
Not sure if this is a GNOME thing or an Ubuntu thing. But it was weird. You’d think that change would have happened with the upgrade, not days later.
GNOME Issue 3: The System Monitor App Doesn’t Remember Its Last Position
This is the last issue I have discovered (so far) and it’s really stupid.
I run the GNOME System Monitor application all the time. I like to have a clue what my CPU and network are up to, so I start that app up every morning. In 20.04 I eventually figured out at what point GNOME would remember the position of the app so it would open at that same location next time. It was odd, though. I think I had to move the app to the location and then exit it to get it to remember the spot when it relaunched. If I shut the system down with the system monitor still running it did not recall the location I had moved it to, and restarted in the middle of the screen next time.
With 22.04 they have removed even that. The app now completely forgets where it was previously positioned, and nothing I can do causes it to open in the same place it did last time.
That means that every morning when I restart the app I have to move it to my preferred location. Not a big deal by itself, but it once again shows a callous disregard for the user. The time needed to reposition that app every morning adds up, and it’s a pointless waste. Computers are good at remembering things like the specific location an app was last at on screen. Why not do that?
Now What?
So here I am with an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system wondering if I will keep it or not. A lot of people will suggest giving up on Linux and moving to Windows or MacOS. Neither of those options works for me.
- Windows is so bloated at this point that I do not trust it. I have a Windows laptop that I get out occasionally, mostly to let it update Windows. The update process takes hours (literally… that is not an exaggeration) and despite being plenty powerful, Microsoft has decided they will not upgrade it to Windows 11. At some point I will be forced to purchase another Windows machine if I want to keep running an updated (and secure) copy of Windows. I do not like supporting that.
- Apple computers don’t work for me. Every time I am forced to use one I confront the fact that Apple has a slew of lore that I simply don’t know. Default scrolling is backwards, keys used for things are different, and so on. I can be productive on a Windows computer, but on a Mac I might as well be using crayons on paper. Nothing makes sense and I struggle to accomplish simple tasks. Moving to a Mac is not for me.
- I could switch to a different distribution, but which one? Likely it would be Linux Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu, but they disable the SNAP system entirely in favor of the usual .deb packages. Its also lighter weight which is good for older hardware. But Mint is not the only choice. There are many distributions, and there is also Anne’s machine to consider. We both run Linux at home and to keep our lives simple it would probably be best if we run the same distribution.
The choice is not obvious, and I am not yet sure how to proceed. Eventually I’ll make a decision, but for now I limp along with Ubuntu 22.04. I wish it worked better for me. Previous upgrades have been painless, but 22.04 has really left a bad taste in my mouth.