Really serious problems with the 14.04 window manager versus crashing applications

Arthur Nonymous jones at communityfiber.org
Mon Oct 20 07:45:14 UTC 2014


Four screens, a Mozilla window on screen 1 and another window on screen 4.
Terminal open in screen 2 with multiple open tabs and open logins to 
remote sites.

The Mozilla instance on screen 4 crashes. The window manager goes through a
series of fits and when all settles down, Mozilla has restarted the 
crashed window,
but all its open windows are now on screen 1 and the Mozilla on screen 1 
has now
moved to screen 4. Not only that, but all open instances of Terminal 
were killed off.
Beyond that, various window manager settings have changed default behavior,
so that e.g. clicking the mouse to the left of a leftmost-column icon no 
longer
displays the available windows for that application, but the user must 
now click to
select which window was wanted.

Again:

LibreOffice on screen 3. A slightly off-centered mouse click to try to 
change tabs
while doing "Format->Paragraph" crashes the application, kills off all 
other windows
running under the window manager and leaves the screen totally black and 
useless
until I log in from outside and kill -1 the "lightdm" process. Shades of 
losing work
because one was using Microsoft, but this is not Microsoft.

I'm going to bitch now, so fair warning.

This is fricking UNIX and UNIX is not supposed to give a crap if an 
application dies.
If Mozilla or LibreOffice want to crap out that is their problem, but 
under no circumstances
can that be allowed to interfere with ANYTHING ELSE RUNNING, and 
certainly the window
manager should NOT GIVE A DAMN and NOT BE AFFECTED.

I strongly suggest that all the developers who so anxiously want to make 
the interface "cooler"
and "neater" such that every damned release forces a new window manager 
on the user -
how about telling these people that they have to FIX THE DAMNED BUGS in 
the prior version
before they move on to their next toy of yet another window manager. 
That will slow them down.

There's no point buying a car with a "good warranty" if that car has to 
spend all its time in
the shop being repaired, under warranty or not. Open Source is supposed 
to be about USER
CHOICE and the least that Ubuntu should do is offer a CHOICE OF WINDOW 
MANAGER at
install time so that the user can keep using the interface they're 
familiar with. This also means
that a series of window managers must be maintained and debugged in 
parallel, but that should
not be so much overhead as surely enough people can be lined up behind 
each of them to keep
them maintained.

Now Ubuntu 14.04 performs MUCH WORSE than my old version 9 system 
because the least thing
that goes wrong with an application totally messes up everything else I 
was doing. Version 9 provided
correct process isolation, version 14 does not. I am surely hardly the 
only person who has noticed this.
If you let things go on this way, Ubuntu will lose any claim to being a 
good system and you will have
killed off what ought to be and remain the World's Champion. Now 
LibreOffice and Mozilla are much more
crash-prone than they used to be, plus thanks to bad "lightdm" QA, if 
they crash they take all the rest of
the user's work with them. I need a parallel FreeBSD system to be able 
to keep terminal windows open
with any certainty ... and that's bankrupt and absurd.

Please fix this.



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