Ubuntu Jaunty Update Pop-Under

[storkus at storkus.com]

And people laugh at me for being a Slackware guy!  Guess who's getting
the last laugh now? :)

Mike

On Fri, 08 May 2009 03:13:41 -0700, "Joseph Sinclair"
<plug-discussion at stcaz.net> said:
> 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
> ;-)
> 
>