So, one of the joys of Ubuntu is upgrading your OS every 6 months or so, getting kicked in the teeth, and spending the next week figuring out how to get back the functionality you used to have.

For me (this time) this meant figuring out why third-button emulation didn’t work on my two button mouse anymore (ancient, I know, but it ain’t broke).  This turns out to be X.org’s fault, and to fix it I have to do the same thing I had to do to enable it 15 years ago when I was running FreeBSD — edit the X config file in vi.  It’s all covered here.  At least xorg.conf is not the godawful mess that XFree’s config file was.  Still, one of Ubuntu’s most consistent failings is the way graphical configuration utilities consistently lag the functionality they support.  Ubuntu switched to pulseaudio as the default sound system two full releases before a pulseaudio configurator was available.  This was a real problem since pulse frequently chose the wrong output device as the default, leaving users with no sound and no way to fix the problem except hand-hacking the pulse config file.

What really reminds me of pulseaudio, though, is Unity, Canonical’s new graphical shell.  I don’t want to be a “the new interface sucks because it’s not the old interface” guy, but Unity is not fully thought out and not ready to be the default desktop.  This guy has it pretty much right (although I don’t hate the new scrollbar).  I wanted to like it, but the mechanism for running applications is fundamentally broken, and that happens to be the main function of an OS.  I could go on for a while about how stupid I think it is for an OS to depend on 3D acceleration, but that just makes me sound like a curmudgeon. As the link points out, though, it’s self-evidently stupid to ship a 3D-only desktop if your OS doesn’t install 3D drivers by default because of its philosophy on proprietary software.

Readers (if there were any) might rightly point out that these things are my fault for upgrading a perfectly working system.  It turns out six months is just about long enough to decide that the things you had to go through last time weren’t so bad, and to convince yourself that the shiny new features you’ll get from updating will be totally worth it.

Now I’m off to figure out why xsane doesn’t work anymore.