I upgraded to Edgy on the weekend, mostly so that I could get a newer version of my IRC client. And actually, I was doing that because an IRC channel keyword I’d been given wasn’t working and I figured it must be my client. It turned out, in fact, that the keyword was bad somehow, so that was a wasted upgrade.
So, what of Edgy in general? Unfortunately for Ubuntu, the software as a whole tends to work well enough that I only notice broken things when I upgrade, so here’s the bad things I’ve noticed:
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When I log in, GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine, so dagnabit, it’ll either run it at 1.6GHz constantly or just tell me it is, I haven’t worked out which. This is one of those things that has worked for me in every previous version of Ubuntu, so it’s annoying that it’s broken now. I believe this is bug 36014.
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If you type words into the address bar, the epiphany browser no longer treats them as search terms for Google, it instead treats them as a bad URL. Now you need to type words in and then select
Search the Web
in the drop-down box. This is one of those niche desktop behaviours that a very small fraction of the users were doing but that I was so addicted to that it was central to my use of the application. It is going to take the best part of a month to retrain my URL usage. I’m heartily tired of the behaviour of the address bar in both Firefox and Epiphany changing (and differently changing) in every new Ubuntu release. That dialog is probably my single most used text input box. No bug, because in my experience changes in the behaviour of this kind of dialog are generally deliberate. -
Aptitude, which I use for package management, is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies. As in, dependency problems that it previously worked out instantly now take a minute or so. It takes that long to begin every single system update. I’m pleased to see that this is bug 51893 and there should be a new package waiting that fixes most of it.
So far, Edgy seems unlikely to best Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10) in its place in my heart as most stable Ubuntu release to date
(Dapper — Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — was less stable for me, Long Term Support be damned, although it’s solid enough on servers). I guess the name is a warning though. In news of things that aren’t broken suspend and hibernate don’t seem to have broken this time around, which is, I think, the first major development version I’ve upgraded to where I didn’t have to spend a lot of time convincing them to work again. And Unison still works for once: usually it whinges if you’re copying files to a machine with a different version of Unison, which is a problem if I don’t want to upgrade all of my servers to the development Ubuntu. (That’s Unison’s fault, not Ubuntu’s, of course. The protocol ought to be stable enough that the server and client can have different versions and still talk to each other).
I hope the intermittent problem with hibernating I had with Dapper are gone, but since they were intermittent I don’t know. Likewise, I hope bug 49221 has disappeared for me at least, but since it was intermittent I can’t be sure yet.