Many, many serious problems with Ubuntu

[Dale Amon]

I have held back from putting in this report for a very long time
as my experience reading this list has led me to believe that no
one will much care because Granny Would Never Do That and she 
certainly Would Never Know How to Do That.

I have a Thinkpad W520. I have identical second screens, Acer's, at
home and at work. The laptop moves back and forth with me and thus
makes the transition back and forth twice a day. I use Mate for my
work space. I can't stand Unity. Matter of taste and habits. I made
my choice and it was to stay with what for me worked far better.

In order to use the VGA connector, I have the BIOS set to the Discrete
Graphics Mode. 

When I boot, one of three things happens:

	* A blue screen of death before even the grub screen appears
	* A large blinking cursor at the top left of a black screen
	  just after the grub screen selection is made.
	* A successful boot where the large blinking cursor turns into
	  a small blinking cursor after some interval and then
	  it goes to the encryption password screen and the boot 
	  suceeeds from there.

In neither of the fault cases does the system print any state info
or give me any diagnostics whatever. All of these problems existed with
Oneiric and still existing with Raring.

That is just one set of problems I include so that one might understand
the further miseries.

The second issue is that sometimes, on a whim, the screen manager will
get confused. One of these cases happens if I connect the VGA connector
to the closed laptop and fail to open the lid fast enough. In that case
it decides the Acer is screen one and it makes it the primary screen.
Opening the laptop at that point does nothing and the situation deteriorates
from there. If you log out and back in again the screen manager misassigns
things; it will not reset the sizes of either screen and attempts to do
so result in a patchwork quilt on the laptop screen. The Acer screen remains
dark. You cannot get out. A logout hangs even if you can manage it. If you
try F2 to get to VT2, it hangs. Total hang, mouse cursor frozen. You have
no choice but to kill the power.

Once in this mode you have to find exactly the right sequence of
spells to get it to do things right again. Often this means doing a total
power down, including pulling the battery and shorting out the input pins
to make sure no state is retained.

The even worse case is the one that catches me out on a regular basis. I
spend nearly as much time in a root virtual terminal as I do in a GUI.
This has been my usual modus operandi for more years than most of you have
been alive. Ain't gonna change and I nearly always forget that doing so
arms a serious time bomb. If, as this evening, I walk of to the kitchen,
get a cookie and something to drink, read an article in a magazine...
when I come back the machine will have gone into a sleep state. If I
were in the GUI, the sleep state would just mean I was in a screen saver.
But if you are in the command line... it is death. You cannot get 
control back. The only choice is: kill the power.

And that triggers a very bad situation. When you come back up and log
in the GUI is screwed up royally. It has lost the second screen; it
is confused about the resolution of either screen, any attempt to fix
it causes a lock up... and to add insult to injury, it often has scrambled
all the icons on your desktop, thinking it somehow knows better than you
as to where you wanted them. It does not ask. It does not let yet say
no. It just gives you the big one up the wazoo and says "See what I've
done? Ha Ha!"

Sometimes I can fix this through multiple cycles of total power down; 
sometimes I have been able to fix it by logggin in as root with Unity
and using the terminal settings there to fix things ONE STEP AT A TIME.
Turn off  "mirror" if it has set it; save the config. Then fix the
resolution for the laptop screen. Save the config. Then set the resolution
for the second screen and save it. Then log out as root, and if I am
lucky, when I log back in as myself, my screens are correct. With my
icons scrambled all over the frigging place, across the boundary 
between screens even, but at least I can work again.

Total elapsed lost time to a typical incident? 1 to 2 hours to 
recover.

I really am seriously annoyed and have been living with this since 
April 2012.

This is not just one bug; I suspect there are quite a few getting
tickled here and they are having a jolly good time at my expense.

I now await the expected lecture, which I am not interested in, and
perhaps, just perhaps, some kind soul who actually gives a damn about
folk who have been using Linux for decades and expect certain things
out of it.