Ubuntu Jaunty Update Pop-Under

[Joseph Sinclair]

I noticed a very irritating "feature" of the new Ubuntu release, I'm posting about it here so nobody else is surprised by it.
Let me preface this with a warning, there is some practical information here, that's at the top; there's also a serious rant, at the bottom, because this design is just plain bad, and the Ubuntu DX devs seem completely unwilling to consider they might have done the complete wrong thing.

Practical:

In Ubuntu 9.04, update-notifier doesn't display an icon, it actually runs update-manager full-screen as a "pop-under".  It's easy to miss, and there's no way to make it NOT run (so on a laptop, for instance, where stupid useless no-change updates are pending, you'll get the blasted thing running every time you boot, and quite often multiple times in a session).
There is a "magic" command to make it stop and go back to how it used to run (which you may have to run regularly since some updates seem to overwrite it), but it must be run for every user who can run updates:
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
Adding that to /etc/bash.bashrc seems to be a quick-and-dirty fix that restores it for every user, and resets it if it gets overwritten.
There's no guarantee this will work after the 9.10 update, but at least it works for now.

Rant:

I just finished reading the most INFURIATING (yes, I'm looking right at you, Ted, even your responses had an uncharacteristically arrogant tone to them, and most everyone else from Canonical had a tone so arrogant it made me sick) bug report I've ever seen in a Linux Distribution (I've seen plenty like this from Microsoft, I expect better from Linux).
It appears that the Ubuntu Desktop Experience (DX) team decided that for Jaunty, they would "clean up" the notification area by removing the update notification, not a bad thing by itself, although it's highly questionable that it even needed to be done.
The problem is that they decided that having an uncontrollable "pop-under" program was the "correct" approach to removing update-manager from the notification area!

One would think that at least there'd be a simple config option "Pop-up frequently when updates available" that I could turn off, there isn't.
One would think it would be easy to disable the whole auto-update structure, it isn't.  I disabled checks for updates, but the blasted thing keeps popping up as long as apt-get is up-to-date.
One would think there would be more communication and choice for something this intrusive.
One would hope that at least the Canonical team, on getting hundreds of negative comments and dozens of separate bug reports in the beta period would revert the change until the user concerns could be addressed.
Unfortunately, none of these were done.

There is an *undocumented* option to "revert" to the old behavior, it's a PITA to use, and you have to keep resetting it.

I have several problems with this situation:
1) Major intrusive UI change with no user option to disable.  I eliminated the problem by simply running apt-get remove update-manager update-notifier, but most users shouldn't do that.
2) There's nothing wrong with the notification area from a user perspective, It's not a "swamp" as Canonical claims, it's typically less than 5 items in Linux, and I normally have 1 or 2 items at most.
3) Notification area is a useful and valued feature.  I DO NOT WANT basic system-config programs running full-screen all the time, I WANT them as little icons in the notification area.  I also want my music player and IM client there (and I have the OPTION to do that).  If you don't like it add options to your program and let the *user* decide.
4) Some of us don't want to install every stupid little piddling update when it comes out.  In the past 6mo I've seen at least 50 updates to 8.10 with a change description of "upstream version match, no change" or something similar.  WHY do I have to have programs interrupting my work every day just because somebody decided to publish an "update" that doesn't update anything?
5) This whole process is being expressed (and this may be a PR issue) as "the devs came up with this idea, and we're going to run with it because we can, and anyone who disagrees is just wrong/stupid/unenlightened/etc...".  That's not what I expect from Linux, or Ubuntu.  I expect EVERYONE involved to *acknowledge* when a change is un-desired by some users, MAKE IT OPTIONAL, and let the *USER* decide what they want.  Devs should NOT force users to work the devs' way, they should give the users tools that work the USERS' way (since devs are users too, they can have options to work "their" way as well, but don't force a single view of the world on 20 million users (or 200 million, or 2 billion)).
6) Rushing major UI changes out before they're done just to make a short release cycle is BAD.  If you can't do it well in this release, wait for the next one.  NO NEW FEATURE is so important it can't wait 6 months for a more complete and/or correct implementation.
7) The devs say "We're going to do bold things", that's fine, but recognize that "bold" things are often WRONG.  Be humble, accept when your "bold" new thing is not good for users and BACK OFF (you can still do it, but make it optional, non-default, and take the user feedback into account before you roll it out any further).  Don't be like MS with Office 2007 and "Ribbons", where a "bold" new UI design just DESTROYED user productivity in line-of-business applications, and MS said, effectively, "like it or lump it".

I used to run the update-notifier because I liked that it would pre-cache the updates for me, just download them in the background for me to install at my leisure (typically rarely because so few actually matter on my systems).  Since it's now so blasted intrusive, I decided I can deal with long downloads on occasion, and just removed the useless monster.

If the whole Gnome/Ubuntu ecosystem is heading this way, I may well go insane.  I don't want to go back to using the command-line for everything, but if everything now in the notification area, like NetworkManager (already bad in many ways) starts doing pop-unders every time my wireless goes weak (at home, that's about every 2 minutes), or pidgin pops-under every time I get an IM, I cannot be held responsible for my response!
This whole mess is destroying user trust just because a few devs seem to hate the notification area, possibly the dumbest thing I've seen any Linux distribution do in a long time.

Thank you for reading, we now return to our regularly scheduled OT flood ;-)


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