18.04 = circular login problem on system freeze

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2018 at 00:05, Jim <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> My experience is exactly the opposite. I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu
> 16.04 to 18.04 and in limited use have seen no problems.

I upgraded my testbed machine to 17.10 and I was surprised at how well
GNOME picked up my Unity settings -- even adding Unity indicators
(weather, system monitor, etc.) in weird distorted but running forms.

I just don't like GNOME 3. I don't see why I should switch between
separate "activities" and normal views -- my mental workflow doesn't
work like that. I don't run one app per virtual desktop -- I have 2
big monitors on all my desktop machines, home and work, and I use
window management to track stuff. I only use virtual desktops on
laptops. I found GNOME's multi-monitor support significantly lacking:
*I* choose where my top panel, dock and desktop switcher go, not my
desktop's programmers, but with GNOME, I can't. Dock and switcher must
be on the same desktop, putting one of them slap in the middle of my
workspace where I don't want it. I use title bars a lot -- I don't
just move stuff, I send-to-back and roll things up and so on. Can't on
GNOME 3, or it's harder and needs tweaks.

If I could use dash-to-panel to merge the dock thing and the top panel
/and put it on one side/ like I do on Windows, it might be OK, but the
developer doesn't support that -- it's top or bottom only.

So I switched to Xfce and it handles it well. Not perfectly, there are
wrinkles, but it works, better than Maté, better than Cinnamon, better
than KDE, and in a more customisable way than LXDE. LXQt isn't ready
-- I tried it, too.

Budgie can do it but very clumsily and clunkily. I must admit, I do
not see the point of Budgie -- it doesn't do anything other desktops
can't do better.

> On the same laptop I upgraded Mint 18 with Cinnamon to Mint 19. After
> the upgrade completed and rebooted Cinnamon crashed and popped up a
> dialog saying it had crashed and I was in fallback mode. At this point I
> did have a very basic looking but usable desktop.

Yeah, I've seen that too. At least when it falls over, it gets back up
and keeps limping along.

Cinnamon suffers the penalty of being a fork. It's forked off what's
now an old version of GNOME 3. Keep current will be a problem for
them.

If they can persuade the Xfce and Maté developers to share the same
set of accessory apps -- the XApps suite -- then that will take a
significant maintenance burden off all 3 of them.

> I did some googling and found other people with problems also. They were
> talking about waiting for a kernel update to fix it.

I blame driver issues, but this is just a guess.

> This laptop doesn't have anything important on it so i googled and found
> out how to add Mate along side Cinnamon. Mate seems to run fine, now I
> can only boot to Mate even if I choose Cinnamon.
>
> I noticed a couple of things after the Mint upgrade. About 10 seconds
> after I choose Mint at the grub menu the screen turns purple and the
> words Ubuntu 19 are centered on it.

*Ubuntu* 19? Not *Mint* 19? Typo?

> It then takes about 3 and a half minutes to get to to the login prompt.

Seems like a long time.

> Once I get a chance I will remove Cinnamon and see if that improves things.

If you can, I'd nuke and reinstall.

-- 
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