Hardware and software integration in Ubuntu

This post is the second part of a two-part series (see previous one on software) where I try to summarize my current experience with the (Gnome) Linux desktop purely as a user. It highlights what I’ve been seeing with Ubuntu series 8.x and 9.x, in most part with my current Toshiba laptop.

The good

These features include those that make me happy when I see them in action. It does not mean however that they’re the only good things – it means that the rest of the stuff that just works I consider essential and can’t remember.

• Out of the box printer and scanner support. At least for HP products, I can just plug in the USB connector and be set.
• SD card hotplugging. Basically this means that thanks to HAL / GVFS I don’t need to use an USB cable to manage my photos, I can just plug the card in my laptop’s reader and immediately see all the files.
• Dual screen mode. It works well but see the point about monitor hotplugging below.
• Suspend to RAM. Before Ubuntu 9.10, not having a working suspend to RAM feature was very frustrating. Fortunately this is fixed now, and it made a big difference to me.

The bad

• Short battery life. Even if I just browse the web and write notes it’s still limited to only 1.5h.
• Wireless connection glitches. In the past I have seen issues with NetworkManager, such as secure wireless connection reset after some hours. Also I was at a conference recently, and there was a kind of a 802.1x setup that I could not connect to and was thus in dark unlike people with MacBooks.
• Monitor hotplugging. In order to use an external monitor in an expected resolution and color gamma I need to plug it in before X loads, then go to Display Preferences and try to set it up, which is not really hotplugging. I’ve tried a couple of monitors with same results. With a larger monitor (24’) I could not get the right resolution at all. GDM is always in the wrong resolution when an external monitor is on.
• Graphic card driver instabilty. It was very annoying to run the defective driver for my i945 chipset which went in the stable release of Ubuntu 9.04. It caused X to leak memory, making the window manager unusable within half a day and requiring a restart. A fix shipped a couple of months later.
• Microphone madness. Murray wrote about it some time ago, and the situation is the same with PulseAudio. As an effect I cannot get Skype video conferencing to work, for example. Or even record audio; with every new version of a distro I always re-try and get tired after ten minutes.
• Slow file transfers. Copying files between the hard disk and SD card or USB flash drive in average is limited to 1.x MB/s. See this for comparison.