lubuntu 20.04 rant, continued
Oh yeah, please, make my life easier with some good-for-nothing package manager. Hell, it's so much more difficult with packages and dependencies. I wonder how Slackware is doing nowadays... Nope, it's still that old 2016 announcement about 14.2 or so.
"Synaptic" in 18.10 was great for removing packages I didn't need, and I preferred the "apt" command for installing—mainly because I install stuff I know I need, one by one. And typically I don't know what comes in a distro whose installer has to be that primitive so as not to offer the user something like "select individual packages", as Slackware (old, curses-based) installer does. Now, in Lubuntu 20.04 we have "muon", lo and behold! And we can report its (perhaps all) bugs only if we have an account at Ubuntu/Canonical. Nice one.
My three favourites (and I'm not going to look for more). From roughly half an hour of "work". If your guess "this work is lost, that's why the guy is so mad", you're right...
(i) the main window remembers (or doesn't reset) the vertical slider position when you switch between package categories. I don't know if there is some deep meaning behind this "feature"; if so, I can't imagine one, but I know my imagination is very limited. And I would gladly welcome a check-box making it possible to opt out from this little... let's agree on a neutral term—constraint. It just does a bad job for me—trying to sort the packages by their "installed" status, read some of the descriptions and mark those I don't need for removal. But it's not a great pain, it's just "oh, where am I, oh, I have to slide that guy up again, it's some other category..."—I can do that, I'm not that old and/or lazy. It's not life threatening, it's annoying, as someone put it.
(ii) Marking packages for removal is great, authenticating each time when I hit "Apply changes", is just painful.
(iii) Having observed (ii), I figured out this has to be a configurable setting, so why not click "Settings". Seems rather innocent and natural—and look for "remember password for a session***" or so... So, I did click "Settings", and by accident hit the "Configure software sources". Muon showed yet another authentication menu which I tried to escape from, just by hitting "Cancel". Which didn't prevent the program ("app" is what they call it nowadays. Oh, and they call subroutines "void functions", heh-heh...) from trying to contact some servers and complain about something... I didn't care about it, but—guess what?—all the "selected for removal" packages lost their selection. Dozens of them. That's 1 for muon. And oh, sucker me, ay-vay! I tried not to log in too many times, I was saving time and keyboard clicks, and hoping for some well-thought design behind a gui.
No, I'm no gui guru* nor a fan** of gui system management, I'm mostly a cli/kiss guy when it comes to maintaining desktops (that's why I feel so f...ng lost and helpless in Windows10—my reunion with Microsoft after almost 20 years of happiness). Which boils down to:
(i) know what you're doing,
(ii) know what you need and what you have,
(iii) save diskspace,
(iv) underclock your cpu(s) whenever you can,
(v) do not overuse your (or your employer's) bandwidth with lots of unnecessary upgrades. I know, bandwitdh and diskspace is cheap, but... I'm just being a bit Jewish here—caring about resources, economical etc.
Muon looks nice and promising and I don't wish it bad. So does Synaptic, modulo its name that makes it easy to get it confused with touchpad drivers (by the way—the default setting for a touchpad in 20.04 is painful and the responsible option is just hilarious). And why is this version shipped with a "long term support" version of a popular distribution of g'nuh|inux? My next step (or GnuStep, huh-huh) is install Synaptic and remove Muon. Die! By my hand! The mere statistics says: someone with an Ubuntu/Canonical account will report the same bugs as those I'm complaining about. And more. (Or not... You treacherous bastards!—J. Cleese)
*In fact I'm designing a lousy gui right now (C#/WPF, you can laugh now), and I feel how badly I suck and imagine how no one would fell comfortable using it. As if testing a library using a gui could make one feel comfortable; perhaps more so than using command line and shell scripts.
**In my old days I used to apply some command-line terror to myself and to the outside world. It was childish and so anti-Windows (MS). I took pride in reading manuals etc. Now I have to code which is fun, but sometimes I have to do it faster... And the amount of time spent on configuring things and making them "run" is just less than it used to be.
"Synaptic" in 18.10 was great for removing packages I didn't need, and I preferred the "apt" command for installing—mainly because I install stuff I know I need, one by one. And typically I don't know what comes in a distro whose installer has to be that primitive so as not to offer the user something like "select individual packages", as Slackware (old, curses-based) installer does. Now, in Lubuntu 20.04 we have "muon", lo and behold! And we can report its (perhaps all) bugs only if we have an account at Ubuntu/Canonical. Nice one.
My three favourites (and I'm not going to look for more). From roughly half an hour of "work". If your guess "this work is lost, that's why the guy is so mad", you're right...
(i) the main window remembers (or doesn't reset) the vertical slider position when you switch between package categories. I don't know if there is some deep meaning behind this "feature"; if so, I can't imagine one, but I know my imagination is very limited. And I would gladly welcome a check-box making it possible to opt out from this little... let's agree on a neutral term—constraint. It just does a bad job for me—trying to sort the packages by their "installed" status, read some of the descriptions and mark those I don't need for removal. But it's not a great pain, it's just "oh, where am I, oh, I have to slide that guy up again, it's some other category..."—I can do that, I'm not that old and/or lazy. It's not life threatening, it's annoying, as someone put it.
(ii) Marking packages for removal is great, authenticating each time when I hit "Apply changes", is just painful.
(iii) Having observed (ii), I figured out this has to be a configurable setting, so why not click "Settings". Seems rather innocent and natural—and look for "remember password for a session***" or so... So, I did click "Settings", and by accident hit the "Configure software sources". Muon showed yet another authentication menu which I tried to escape from, just by hitting "Cancel". Which didn't prevent the program ("app" is what they call it nowadays. Oh, and they call subroutines "void functions", heh-heh...) from trying to contact some servers and complain about something... I didn't care about it, but—guess what?—all the "selected for removal" packages lost their selection. Dozens of them. That's 1 for muon. And oh, sucker me, ay-vay! I tried not to log in too many times, I was saving time and keyboard clicks, and hoping for some well-thought design behind a gui.
No, I'm no gui guru* nor a fan** of gui system management, I'm mostly a cli/kiss guy when it comes to maintaining desktops (that's why I feel so f...ng lost and helpless in Windows10—my reunion with Microsoft after almost 20 years of happiness). Which boils down to:
(i) know what you're doing,
(ii) know what you need and what you have,
(iii) save diskspace,
(iv) underclock your cpu(s) whenever you can,
(v) do not overuse your (or your employer's) bandwidth with lots of unnecessary upgrades. I know, bandwitdh and diskspace is cheap, but... I'm just being a bit Jewish here—caring about resources, economical etc.
Muon looks nice and promising and I don't wish it bad. So does Synaptic, modulo its name that makes it easy to get it confused with touchpad drivers (by the way—the default setting for a touchpad in 20.04 is painful and the responsible option is just hilarious). And why is this version shipped with a "long term support" version of a popular distribution of g'nuh|inux? My next step (or GnuStep, huh-huh) is install Synaptic and remove Muon. Die! By my hand! The mere statistics says: someone with an Ubuntu/Canonical account will report the same bugs as those I'm complaining about. And more. (Or not... You treacherous bastards!—J. Cleese)
*In fact I'm designing a lousy gui right now (C#/WPF, you can laugh now), and I feel how badly I suck and imagine how no one would fell comfortable using it. As if testing a library using a gui could make one feel comfortable; perhaps more so than using command line and shell scripts.
**In my old days I used to apply some command-line terror to myself and to the outside world. It was childish and so anti-Windows (MS). I took pride in reading manuals etc. Now I have to code which is fun, but sometimes I have to do it faster... And the amount of time spent on configuring things and making them "run" is just less than it used to be.
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