I recently upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04 on my desktop machine, and so far, it’s been a mess. This was not the painless upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 or from 8.04 to 8.10. So far:
1. ATI/AMD is no longer providing drivers for my X1900XTX video card, so I’m using the free drivers. The problem is that I can’t use two monitors without the mouse flickering like crazy and some strange window focusing problem where an unfocused window “jumps out” at me occasionally and then reverts to normal. Disabling compiz and visual effects didn’t solve this. Only when I disable the second monitor do the flickering and focusing issues go away. I’m still messing with this one to try and find a solution, but there isn’t anyone else on the internet that’s complained about this. I find it funny that people switch to Linux so they can run older hardware, but without driver support, that can’t happen. The free drivers work well, but only if you’ve got one monitor.
2. Something hosed my ability to play MP3s with Amarok. From this thread, I learned that running the following solved the problem:
sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-xine
3. Flash stopped working in Firefox. Any page with Flash would crash Firefox. This can be solved by uninstalling and reinstalling Flash:
sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree flashplugin-installer
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
4. My Eclipse installation randomly crashes. Also, the splash screen never goes away after starting up. I’m in the process of reinstalling Eclipse to see if this does anything. Edit: reinstalling appears to have fixed the crashing and splash screen issues.
This hasn’t been an enjoyable experience so far — I was under the opinion that Linux is reaching maturity, especially Ubuntu, but this is definitely not the case. The problems I’m experiencing seem to be a step backward from the last upgrade cycle. As I just mentioned, the ability to run fast on older hardware is a huge enticement to switch to Linux, and if my three year old desktop can’t handle it, there’s a lot more work to be done. I’m certainly not going to buy a new video card that’s worth much more than the rest of the computer.
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