Xubuntu Woes
My Happy Feet time with Xubuntu 15.10 ended. In addition to my Xfce wish list, a few additional paper cuts wore me down.
Xubuntu seems to struggle with wireless. I have several operating systems installed on my laptop. None have problems with wireless. The wireless problem seems most often to manifest when I reboot from one of those systems into Xubuntu or cold boot into Xubuntu after powering down. Just as often as not, wireless just doesn’t connect or initialize correctly. A reboot back into Xubuntu usually solves the problem.
For some reason my menu woes of MATE are now far worse in Xubuntu. I do not know what happened because initially there were no menu delays with Xubuntu. I am using the standard menu and not the Whisker menu.
I do not use a boot splash and prefer to watch stdout. About half the time when I halt or reboot, Xubuntu fails to unmount all mounts. Including local mounts and not just NFS mounts.
I have been using Caja as my file manager in Xubuntu because Thunar lacks features I want. Within Xfce Caja always starts slow the first instance and occasionally throughout the day. Probably some kind of preload issue that does not affect MATE.
Not the fault of Xubuntu per se, but the Xfce terminal keeps shrinking whenever I use mc (midnight commander). Another Xfce quirk is the lack of meaningful startup feedback. Despite enabling “Use startup notification” in icon properties, much of the time there are no clues that an app is actually starting. Sometimes there might be a spinning mouse pointer, but more often than not, nothing.
At this point I am willing to be charitable and chalk this off to the “usual” Ubuntu bugginess found in non LTS releases. I will keep Xubuntu on the laptop and see how updating to the LTS 16.04 flies.
I have my eye on Ubuntu MATE 16.04. I have been fiddling with the daily updates in a virtual machine (VM). I am in awe of this team’s abilities to create a usable and attractive desktop. As my testing thus far is limited to a VM, I have no idea whether I’ll see the same wireless issues. The menu at least responds timely.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Xfce, Xubuntu
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