Feedback for 18.04

Hi guys,

Just wanted to share some feedback about 18.04 Gnome Desktop that I had just upgraded to from 16.04, because my general experience is that it is slow and it is a step back.

  1. I had to upgrade to 18.04 because i needed postgresql 10. Most of my servers were 18.04.
  2. I am a linux user for about 20 years now so I know my way around
  3. do-release-update worked right to the moment of reboot
  4. Legacy boot - because I had this option for legacy boot in my bios it took me some time to figure out how to make it boot again. All, I mean all of my colleagues had had a similar problem after we discussed it at lunch. So something that breaking is a lot damaging for ubuntu experience. Some note, easily visible and accessible, or a warning during upgrade would have been really nice.
  5. So it took me about 4 hours from do-release-upgrade to while I was again able to log into my machine. Which is about half a day with almost no access to the machine
  6. 18.04 is visibly slower. I have not spend time identifying why but a simple Alt-Tab takes like 2-3 times more. An yes, it is a feeling, I’ve not measured it yet, but it is there.
  7. While login there is not indication of the language you are typing
  8. Workspaces are a huge issue. I suppose that developers and community members participating in the decisions over the changes in new LTS have more understanding about the needs of this same community. Thank being said for the last day or so there is not a single person I’ve met and talked about 18.04 that has not mentioned “Workspaces”. I could even share that I am one of the few that has managed through persistence and great dedication of about 1.5 hours to return again to a workspace grid with Alt+Tab not switching between all the windows in all the workspaces, but just between the windows on this workspace. And I still have not return to a completely working state where the workspace switches shows the windows that are on this workspace, but I kind of spent my time and energy budget on this already.
  9. Suddenly the whole screen is one “bar” less. This is because I currently have Firefox with the “All time topics - Ubuntu Community Hub - Mozilla Firefox” bar at the top and than above it there is the “Activities” bar

I can continue, but I hope this could serve as feedback to the people that are actually part of the decision making process.

1 Like

We know 18.04 is visibly slower than 16.04 was. That’s just due to the move to GNOME Shell.

Efforts are underway to greatly improve performance, but any improvements will happen in releases 19.04 and 19.10 etc first. Then 18.04 will get some of thos performance improvements afterwards. In fact, a couple of performance improvements to gnome-shell are queued up and waiting in bionic-proposed for 18.04 right now.

It is a long term effort to fix the major performance issues in GNOME Shell and we are making steady progress (stutter | latency | CPU).

If you would like the old user experience (and performance) of 16.04 in 18.04 then you can install it:

sudo apt install unity-session
6 Likes

I’ve noticed this too when I tried the default Gnome Shell. However, the Unity desktop is just as snappy as it always was so that is my preferred desktop for the time being.

Unity saves vertical space by combining a window’s title bar with the top bar. GNOME apps instead often merge the app’s toolbar and title bar into a “header bar”. Since it’s up to each app to use this design, not all will take advantage of it. With recent Firefox releases (iirc starting with version 60) you can remove the titlebar in the menu > Customize > uncheck Title Bar.

It’d be a great achievement, if the devs can stop the slowness of gnome-shell. And, the slowness of snaps.

2 Likes

Aaa, the sound. Yep. The sound.

I kind of got worried there because the ubuntu 18.04 was the first ever ubuntu upgrade (for the last 10+) that did not break the sound on my computer. I even went around the office with “guys it is kind of slow and there are lots of thing going on in this new ubuntu and I even have my sound working after the upgrade”.

Turns out it just took it 4 days more after the upgrade. I upgraded on wednesday and on sunday I no longer have sound.

I just have “no cards available for configuration” and they were there in the morning.

I have “Dummy output” now, and just hours ago when I closed the machine, without turning it off or restarting, just closing and sleeping, the cards were there and I had sound

Hmmm. This seems to be turning into a rather loose bug thread…which may be promptly closed (bug reports belong on the bug tracker).

However, I don’t think that’s what was intended. It’s hard to tell exactly what was intended beyond “Ubuntu 18.04 was harder to upgrade than expected” due to some design decisions, some bugs, and some apparently problematic hardware.

The design decisions are on-topic. If you want to discuss how pre-release testing missed your hardware, that’s also on topic. Coordinating bug solutions are also on-topic. Volunteering to solve bugs is on-topic. Reporting bugs is generally not (this is not the bug tracker).

Completely understand you @ian-weisser.

Most of the things I am referring to are not exactly bugs, so I will not consider them bugs to be discussed (except for the sound card). I have great respect for everybody involved and spending their energy on building a better ubuntu.

What I am trying to do is to summarize feedback from a user experience point of view. Of course I could enter a bug that I am missing my “workspaces” but then it will be closed with - “not a bug, this is by design” Because it is actually by design. Also I could open a bug with - “I upgraded and I no longer can boot my machine” and in this bug we would discuss all the different things about legacy boots and efi files, but the bug will be closed with “not a bug, this is a design decisions”. Because it is. But there are not many resource on which efi file exactly to choose when you finally manage to switch from legacy boot and have to choose one of the 8 files in the /ubuntu and /boot folders that are shown from the bios.

And we could go on here. Is it a bug that up until now for the last many versions I was able to use Alt+Tab and switch between windows in the current workspace but now suddenly I am switching between all the windows in all the workspace.

I think that these (along with all the other issues I had for the last 5 days. ) are not bugs from a developer and OS point of view.

What I would like to point out is that non of my colleagues including me had a seamless and issue free upgrade to ubuntu 18.04. Non of them have opened any bugs because as developers we understand that these are not bugs. This is more like how things were “decided” to be.

And non of us feels competent enough to take decisions about a future of an OS that we love and we’ve heavily invested in so we are thankful for the efforts that others have put into the process. But we could at least share feedback. Not detailed, log full, screenshot full, which versions of what you are using full feedback. But simple, user, “I don’t know why is this happening to me”, loosely defined, “without a single action to be taken”, feedback that I hope could help in future decision making process.

How do I think this might help - well for sure the upgrade process stopped a few times to tell me some things have changed in my configuration files- for apache and postgresql and asked me to diff them and accept on of the versions, but it did not for a moment stopped to tell be “look now, you will not be able to boot and we think it is important for you to know this”. Probably we could think of a way to properly inform the user. Or “look, we’ve decided to change to gnome because of reasons you could see here. Not everything would be like it is, but I see that you’ve used”. Should a user be bothered with such things during upgrade? I don’t know. Probably people have though about it and decided that users should not be bothered. Or probably they do not have data on whether people want to be bothered by this or not.

These are the ways I think such feedback could serve a purpose.

Migrating to Ubuntu 18.04 also somehow, now sure how, deletes all your gpg keys. This I think is serious because I can not now return a backup that was made with the public gpg key since the private is gone.

(I continue with this tread. Hope people could find at a single place at improve on this.)

Long story short the error is

gpg: decryption failed: No secret key

and

gpg --list-secret-keys

lists nothing.

And I know that ubuntu 18.04 upgrade is the reason since I have a 16.04 backup and there it works.

So, keep your gpg keys and archive them before upgrading to 18.04

Turns out after 18.04 and my desire to return to the backups I can no longer mount the backups. They are encrypted with encfs and doing

encfs /tmp/nfs/encrypted/ /tmp/unencrypted/

gives you

drwx------  1   1024 users   6620 ĐĽĐ°Ń€ 31 09:57 unencrypted

So there is some mismatch between the way encfs from 18.04 and encfs from 16.04 handles the mounting process. After mounting I am not allowed to “cd” into the folder. Don’t know why and don’t know how to solve it yet. Just be caution that encfc will behave differently on 18.04

Wow. Just added the headphones to the audio jack and pressed Alt+Left to return back on the firefox browser previous tab.

The whole system stopped, it killed Gnome and it showed me one of the tty and where were a bunch of errors along with my password in clear text. I had to restart. Can not reproduce it. I am starting to thing “I see dead people”

So. Putting headphones and pressing Alt+Left on firefox in the same time killed GNOME and showed me tty with my clear password.

Still trying to mount my encfs backups

Guys, here is what just happen. The whole ubuntu 18.04 with gnome just crashed. Log is:

Do you think I should open a bug. Where do you think it would be best to open a bug?

Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[2810]: i965: Failed to submit batchbuffer: Bad address
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 nautilus[8369]: nautilus: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gnome-terminal-[25548]: gnome-terminal-server: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 chromium-browser.desktop[3820]: [3820:3820:0426/112921.388949:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_x11.cc(62)] X IO error received (X server probably went away)

Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 indicator-cpufr[3428]: indicator-cpufreq: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0
.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-xsettings[3346]: gsd-xsettings: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-wacom[3353]: gsd-wacom: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-clipboard[3368]: gsd-clipboard: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 chromium-browser.desktop[3820]: [3861:3861:0426/112921.389067:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(237)] G
etVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed!
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gnome-shell[3177]: gnome-shell: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 cryptkeeper.desktop[32272]: cryptkeeper: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-keyboard[3381]: gsd-keyboard: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-color[3372]: gsd-color: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 keepassx.desktop[32076]: keepassx: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 chromium-browser.desktop[3820]: [3861:3861:0426/112921.510870:ERROR:x11_util.cc(109)] X IO error received (X 
server probably went away)
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gnome-session-binary[2827]: WARNING: App 'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Clipboard.desktop' exited with code 1
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gnome-session[2827]: gnome-session-binary[2827]: WARNING: App 'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Clipboard.desktop' ex
ited with code 1
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 gsd-power[3334]: gsd-power: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 nautilus-deskto[3442]: nautilus-desktop: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 update-notifier[4706]: update-notifier: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 google-chrome.desktop[25162]: [25162:25162:0426/112921.387211:ERROR:chrome_browser_main_extra_parts_x11.cc(62
)] X IO error received (X server probably went away)
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 google-chrome.desktop[25162]: [25198:25198:0426/112921.386993:ERROR:x11_util.cc(109)] X IO error received (X 
server probably went away)
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 ibus-daemon[3205]: GChildWatchSource: Exit status of a child process was requested but ECHILD was received by waitpid(). See the documentation of g_child_watch_source_new() for possible causes.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 firefox.desktop[6765]: Gdk-Message: 11:29:21.533: /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 ibus-daemon[3205]: GChildWatchSource: Exit status of a child process was requested but ECHILD was received by waitpid(). See the documentation of g_child_watch_source_new() for possible causes.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 firefox.desktop[6765]: Gdk-Message: 11:29:21.527: /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 firefox[6765]: firefox: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 at-spi-bus-launcher[3102]: XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0"
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 at-spi-bus-launcher[3102]:       after 120599 requests (120599 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
Apr 26 11:29:21 kireto-laptop3 firefox.desktop[6765]: Gdk-Message: 11:29:21.527: /usr/lib/firefox/firefox: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temp

I was just disabled from publishing new topics on the community.ubuntu.com. I did not received a notification why, but there is no new topic button available.

This means I can only answer to this thread, and I just found out that by downgrading encfs to 1.8.1-3 that is available in xenial I was again able to mount my folders and with encfs 1.9.2 from the ubuntu 18.04 version it is not possible. How should I post this for everybody to learn from and resolve problems if I am not allowed to create new topics?

Let’s see…

  • Looking through your site permissions, I don’t seen any block/suspension/whatever for you. As far as I can tell on the admin side, you have the same permission to create new threads as everybody else. If the problem persists, PM me and we’ll troubleshoot it together.

  • “Migrating to Ubuntu 18.04 also somehow, now sure how, deletes all your gpg keys” seem like unintended behavior (a bug)…if it can be reproduced. When I migrated to 18.04, none of my keys were deleted. Sussing this out seems like a fairly typical support question (i.e. off-topic here).

  • “after 18.04 and my desire to return to the backups I can no longer mount the backups. They are encrypted with encfs.” Troubleshooting encrypted backups also seems a fairly typical support question. Since you have not pointed out a specific design problem or referred to a specific bug, not much seems likely to happen here. “It didn’t work” is appropriate here…but only in the pre-release testing threads.

  • “The whole system stopped.” Please report crashes the the bug tracker, with the complete .crash file included. Ubuntu will generally try to do this for you using whoospie/daisy - let it do so. If you have a bug number, and want to talk about possible solutions, that would be on topic.

Since this thread doesn’t really seem to have a focus anymore that is valid for this venue, I’m going to close it here. This kind of thread is more appropriate at our sibling site, ubuntuforums.org.

The goal here is not to stifle discussion, but to steer discussion and feedback into the correct channels where it will do the most good.