Additional edit: This is exactly the same as what I posted on FB, so if you saw it there already, it doesn’t offer anything new

Disclaimer: Linux is fine, but sometimes the little things just piss you off cumulatively.

Linux Mint 12’s Wifi makes for an interesting case study. The connection is unstable and drops out a lot. Each time that happens it pops up a notification at the bottom of the screen. In fact it’s showing right now “Disconnected – you are now offline”. The fun part is that the notification bar thing it has will even interfere with other windows. I thought I had broken X (the windowing environment) because no menus would show, but once I closed the notification suddenly it worked again.

My favourite part is that the connection/authorization dialog exists twice. First as a standard dialog. But also as this other weird themed dialog that grays the rest of the screen for some reason. Aside from the second one looking like the text was laid out by a mentally retarded koala bear (the text doesn’t even line up with the outline of the textbox, probably because I had the utter gall to change the system font from the default). Aside from that, there is no difference.

of course they both pop up while I’m in the middle of typing something, steal the focus, and then I start typing in the password box, you know, because even though it already has the password it has to ask me again just to be sure. then I have to backspace and retype it again.

And the best part is if I leave it unattended with the wifi on.

If I leave it for a few hours, and come back, it will literally be filled with authorization required dialogs. there was one time where I actually sat there for at least a good minute cancelling those dialogs. I ended up forcing everything closed by force-quitting the X-Server. The pattern is always the same, too.

-Leave system with wifi enabled
-do something
-come back to a bajillion “authorization required” dialogs. meanwhile, the connection is still at 2 signal bars so what it is talking about I’ve no clue. Usually I cannot actually see the desktop because at least half of those bajillion dialogs are the one that fades the screen for no reason, and when you have that many of them the background is just black.

So I press OK on the one on top, which helpfully has the password filled in already, making one wonder why the hell it’s asking me in the first place. This reveals of course the bajillionty other authorization dialogs of the “standard” style, all on top of one another. However for about 5 seconds absolutely nothing responds to mouse clicks, at which point I’m suddenly looking at a desktop with nothing but my wallpaper for another 5 seconds, until suddenly all the windows reappear, in what seems to be a random order. And then I have to click on the taskbar thing at the bottom to select one of the authorization required dialogs, press ok, press another, press OK, ad infinitum. It’s downright bloody ridiculous.

The more I use it the more convinced I become that Linux is nothing more than a hodgepodge of components for which interoperability is a gamble. (Does Program X work with Gnome? with ratpoison? does it work with KDE? Roll the dice and find out, assuming you can even get the damned thing to compile with the equally random collection of libraries you have). The fact that the whole “it’s more customizable” argument is utter tosh because most Linux zealots idea of “customization” is either changing the desktop wallpaper to a single background or writing some idiotic desktop panel applet, which will break, of course, the next time the desktop environment you wrote it for updates. Much like Desktop Drapes. “oh cool,a program to slideshow wallpapers” I thought, which was nice to have, and it worked well. With Mint 12 and Gnome 3 of course that program is utterly useless. It still launches and thinks it’s doing something but the wallpaper never changes because some retard decided that Gnome 3, for whatever reason, would disregard anything coming from a program trying to access it using the Gnome 3 functionality, why? I don’t know. maybe it regards those programs as uncultured. The end result for me was that, by upgrading from Mint 10 to Mint 12, I lost the ability to have a wallpaper slideshow. A feature that should be built into the god damned operating System. So what I ended up having to do was write a python script to do it, which was not fun because programming against any desktop environment seems to involve setting random environment variables and crossing your fingers that some random daemon running on the system will do something useful with that change, then discovering that was the “old way” and Gnome 3 does it a “better way” and by better way they mean that it does the exact same thing but requires a more verbose syntax and relying on yet another external program which itself probably just sets an environment variable. meanwhile, as I write this, the authorization dialog once again jumped at me, insisting I give it information it already bloody well has, so I had to delete a entire phrase I had typed, retype the password, and press enter. Then I wrote the previous sentence, at which point the notification dialog popped up informing me that it was unable to connect. Well thanks I figured that out when you showed me that dialog designed by a banana plant, thank you very much. And the mouse was near the bottom of the screen so for reasons that are beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals the notification managed to steal the focus as well. After breaking from my chain of thought to deal with the most idiotic and pain in the ass UX I have ever had the displeasure of having to use, the authorization dialog popped up once more, even though the connection had been established (which again, flies in the face of the “connection failed” which it had JUST BLOODY TOLD ME). If you are going to notify me of something, make sure that notification is actually bloody accurate and doesn’t come ten minutes after I disconnected and reconnected, because then it makes you seem a little slow. “OH! you disconnected! your OFFLINE!” Yes, thank you Network manager, that was ten minutes ago “OH I NEED your PASSWORD for this access point even though I already have it thought I’d make sure”, “oh ok, here it is” “ok, now just enter it about 500 more times in these other dialogs I put up in the last hour while you were away.”

This all combines nicely with the absolute refusal of syndaemon to do what it is supposed to, which is make it so while I am typing taps on the touchpad don’t move the cursor. Instead what it’s function seems to be, even though I set it to disable tap-clicks for 5 seconds, is randomly make it so the mouse doesn’t move. I’ve had to kill X to get the mouse working, and sometimes that doesn’t work. The word “working” in my last sentence was helpfully inserted into the authorization dialog that decided to steal the damned window focus for the millionth bloody time.

Of course, the answer in the Linux community is to move to another upstream. “Oh, Mint is going to go with Debian instead of Ubuntu as a base”. Well, that’s great, but I don’t see how that solves the elementary UX problems like notifications and random unnecessary dialogs stealing the bloody keyboard focus for no good reason at all, or popping up the same dialog a MILLION BLOODY TIMES. How hard was it to put in a bit of code to check if you were already asking for a password? Actually, how about if you already have a saved password, you don’t prompt at all, that would be great. And it would be just awesome if it actually tried to connect to the access point I told it to and for which I’ve given it the password, instead of going “OH I found this other access point with a higher signal so I’ll just give it the password you gave me for the other one” and then it comes back with a look of surprise when it discovers the password isn’t in fact a skeleton key for all the access points in the area but only for the one access point I told it to bloody connect to.