The Simple Things in Life

[John Moser]

On Tue, 2016-07-19 at 14:29 -0700, Jason Benjamin wrote:
> I've been irritated by so many obvious shortcomings of Ubuntu this
> version (16.04).  So many of the most obvious fixes are easily
> attributed to configuration files.  I don't know if those who
> purchase the operating system directly from Canonical versus a
> download are having to deal with the same problems or are getting a
> superior/better operating system.  Some of  my main qualms that I am
> unable to deal with are the theming.  Even using alternative themes
> most of them won't even look right as supposed.  
> The HIBERNATION itself seems to work fine on other closely related
> distros (Elementary OS I tested).  but Ubuntu has problems with it.
>  AFAIK the GRUB_CMDLINE breaks this if anything, and alternatives
> such as TuxOnIce don't work either.  My guess is that its Plymouth
> and there doesn't seem to be any clear pointers to a solution.  After
> desktop session saving was deprecated (or removed because of
> transition from Gnome?), this seems like a serious and necessary
> *implementation* of desktop application saving.  
> I've seen a lot of these blogs that suggest installing extra programs
> and such after the installation.  Here's mine:
You just listed a bunch of odd things about hiding the boot process.
I've been repeatedly distressed and confused by this hidden boot
process.  I've sat and waited at blank screens and splashes that give
no feedback, wondering if the kernel is hanging at initializing a
driver, trying to find network, or making decisions about a disk.
 There is no standard flow which can be disrupted with a new, non-error 
status message curtly explaining that something is happening and all is
well; there is a standard flow in which the machine displays a blank,
meaningless state for a fixed amount of time, and deviation in that
time by any more than a few tenths of a second gives the immediate,
gut-wrenching feeling that the system has hanged during boot and is
terminally broken in some mysterious and completely-unknown manner.
What Ubuntu needs most is a simple, non-buried toggle option to show
the boot process--including displaying the bootloader, displaying the
kernel load messages, and listing which services are loading and
already-loaded during the graphical boot.  Ubuntu's best current
feature is the Recovery boot mode, aside from not having a setting to
make this the standard boot mode sans the recovery prompt.  "Blindside
the user with a confusing and meaningless boot process and terror at a
slight lag in boot time because the system may be broken" is not a good
policy for boot times longer than 1 second.
Even Android displays a count of system assemblies AOT cached during
boots after update so as to convey to the user that something is indeed
happening.
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