Updated: December 13, 2024
Lately, my Executive has been misbehaving somewhat. Wait. That's not a correct statement. Let me rephrase it. The laptop had worked amazingly well until a random kernel (plus firmware) update ruined it. The story of modern operating systems, designed and released without any testing, because words like DevOps, canary and unit testing have replaced hard, grueling work as the words de jour. No one wants to do boring QA. Everyone wants to be a leet coder.
The tribulations I've experienced are detailed in my fifth and sixth Executive reports. From a perfectly stable experience to a nonsensical rollercoaster of crappy quality. Now, any one issue would not be a problem, but together, they create a horrible impression. And then, just when I thought, well, that's it, peace and quiet again, a whole new range of issues assailed my box, and so, here we are, in the seventh installment of my Slimbook Executive saga, and it's the worst one yet. Follow me.
Power management is utterly broken
It's official. My Slimbook is no longer fun. What started as an amazing, robust, top-notch machine has now become a typical nerdy sandbox, full of bugs and problems and regressions. On top of all of the issues that I mentioned in the reports 5 and 6, there's now yet another nonsense. Namely, there's no more screen dimming. Let the laptop be, plugged or not, the screen will dim and then wake a minute later and stay like that forever, bleeding your battery.
Before this new issue happened (and after the ill-fated updates), a few times, while working, my screen would suddenly go completely dark and then recover a few seconds later (as though someone activated the relevant laptop Fn + screen off sequence, but without it actually being done). And then, I noticed my battery not holding charge as much as I thought it should, and lo and behold, this correlates beautifully with the screen always-on problem.
If I think more about this, we have the following sequence of zero-QA issues that affect my Executive:
- In report 5, I mentioned the keyboard issue and the media playback & screen dimming issue, which seems like an ominous precursor to the wider problem I'm experiencing here.
- In report 6, I mentioned ACPI errors (probably due to botched firmware), the keyboard issue coming back and the resolution - disabling the IPv6 kernel module fixes this. The tweak takes a GRUB entry plus module blacklisting, highlighting just how stupid and annoying and intrusive modern systems are. Why not a simple sysctl entry like in the old days, or a simple switch? Ah, no, we can't have simplicity, but as long as we make fun of Windows people, we're okay.
Now, we have a complete borkness of the system's power management. Restarting the relevant power management service via the command line does not help:
systemctl restart --user plasma-powerdevil.service
Changing the dimming timeouts for any one defined profile does not help. Coincidentally, there are a few KDE-related threads, which mention a similar issue. I also tried to turn off the KScreen 2 service, but this didn't help in any way, either.
I suspect this is a kernel issue + perhaps KDE issue, as similar problems also manifest on my Titan machine, which has a completely different processor architecture, and a different graphics card. We shall see if and when a new kernel update fixes this, but for now, this Exec has become an amateur sandbox.
Mini update: the Slimbook team emailed me after I published the fifth report, concerned with the findings. I totally understand them. They sold me a perfectly functional laptop, and yes, back then, it worked superbly. But since, shoddy software updates have degraded the usability of the machine. Not a hardware problem, and I can't blame the Slimbook team for this, as they draw some of the flak, but hey, this article, as all my Linux-related articles, is a facet of my long and arduous journey with open source and such.
More problems
You would think, or at least hope, the power management issue would be the only thing that's gone wrong. But no. There's more. It's all interconnected, and so, read and weep:
- The desktop wallpapers no longer rotate. I have half a dozen images, and Plasma would correctly rotate them, until recently. This no longer happens, and coincidences 100% with the power management issues.
- My mouse cursor suddenly went sluggish - turns out the pointer slider was reset to middle, whereas I always have it set to maximum speed. If you choose flat acceleration, then your mouse remains sluggish. You must use adaptive. Also, 100% correlation to the power management nonsense.
- Finally, GwenView decided to bork on me (while doing an image rotation) - multiple crashes, so far.
I also noticed a lot of IPv6-related errors in my system log. Namely, even though I've disabled IPv6 as I mentioned above, NetworkManager blindly tries to configure IPv6 - and fails. But this isn't a single failure on first connection. Nope. This is repeated, obtuse spamming of my system log.
NetworkManager[1203]: <warn> [1729288804.5217] platform-linux: do-add-ip6-address[2:]: failure 95 (Operation not supported)
You see, this is what happens when code is just written for the sake of it, without taking into account the philosophy of the end usage. In this case, there are multiple problems - the NetworkManager does not check the system configuration, does not have a graceful stop period, does not have a UI button to disable IPv6 for all networks (you need to manually do this, per connection).
We will have a complete tutorial on how to manage this more effectively, namely through the command-line, and for all your connections, all at once. For now, this is a quick workaround for a horrible implementation. Digital welding and all that, as I've always said. So there you go ...
Update (literal and figurative, system and article)
Normally, it takes me a while to collect all of the info I need for these reports. I write as I encounter problems, and so, what I wrote above took place over a period of several days - or weeks, if you will, considering my findings stretch over three reports (from 5 to now).
Anyway, there was a big system update - some 500MB worth, including a new kernel. I applied it, rebooted, and the power management issues are now somewhat resolved. As I suspected.
Now, power management works correctly about 50% of the time. I've not figured out the exact sequence of steps for when it works, and when it doesn't. It definitely works well right after a reboot, but after several suspend & resume actions, something goes awonk in the system. I haven't identified a pattern just yet.
It's good to see such a big, major problem being worked on (probably by accident), but then, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. The fact the Linux desktop is still considered alpha-quality playground for nerds, be what may, is simply unacceptable. The absolute lack of testing, no focus on quality and productivity for normies, and the inclusion of a billion disparate parts from across the ecosystem with no regard to the philosophical question of desktop usage, further QA, or wider integration make me sad and furious.
And now, once again, everyday usage
Well, what can I say? In a matter of weeks, I've gone from superb to having to contend with broken screen dimming, random screen dimming, mouse going slow, NetworkManager spamming my logs, keyboard issues, and a few other choice problems. Now, most of those are fixed, and only the power management issues remain. Other than a dozen issues, everything is perfect, the Slimbook Executive and its Kubuntu 22.04 function great! Please note the previous sentence was written with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
But yeah. We're back in the game, kinda. All it took was two months of pain, three kernel updates, a couple of firmware updates, and a thousand expletives hurled at the machine, for the issues to go away ... 50%. During that time, I was (mostly) able to do what I needed, but with ever-eroding levels of confidence and patience. The honeymoon period is definitely over. The bull is no longer enamored by the moon, I mean the laptop.
My productivity has dipped somewhat, I have a light aversion using the machine and its operating system now. It's nothing major. But previously, there was enormous positivity. Now, it's guarded skepticism, apathy. At best, I feel neutral toward the system. Even though it's silly feeling any sort of "emotion" toward machines, I truly and genuinely enjoyed using the Executive. Just holding it was fun.
Such an unnecessary string of problems. All of them. A bit more attention to detail, a lot more QA and testing, and the pointless kernels would never have been released, never caused the issues, and I would still be a happy camper. But that ship has sailed ...
You could say I made a wrong choice with the operating system - Ubuntu. Well, Kubuntu, but essentially, it's Ubuntu with the KDE desktop on top of it. Perhaps. But I'm not sure. This seems to be the least worst option out there. One, Plasma is the superior desktop environment, hands down, and this includes Windows. Two, Ubuntu, for all its failures, is still the most widely used and tested (within the brittle boundaries of the word tested in the modern software sense) Linux distro, it comes with five-year LTS, free Pro offering (for ten years of updates), and has served me well so far. Having tested tons of other distros, I think I did as well as I could. And apparently, that still isn't enough, it seems.
BTW, small productivity and usability problems remain - all of a sudden, the media player icon did not show "as relevant" even though I was playing a song in VLC, and it should have. This seems to be a new buglet. The IrfanView icon shows incorrectly when the program is open - it shows the Thumbnail panda icon and not the program's default image (masked cat). And as you can see in the screenshot above, Telegram is open, but there's no shading of the icon in the taskbar to indicate so, as you can see for some other programs, e.g.: Firefox, Calibre or perhaps Kate. So, there seems to be a lot of little trouble in the (Plasma) desktop world, unfortunately.
Conclusion
For about a year and a bit, my Slimbook Executive has worked beautifully, smoothly. It was probably the most elegant experience I've had with any one Linux laptop. Clean, stable, fun. Then, in a span of about two months, my experience has been thoroughly ruined. My confidence in this system is gone. Yup, gone. And I'm not sure it will ever come back. All it took was a bunch of nerdy system updates, done with little to no testing, which rendered my perfectly functioning box into a pile of broken code like it's 2005.
The worst part, I hate myself. I am trying to move away from Windows, I invest my energy, time and hope into Linux, hoping against logic that THIS TIME, things will be great, and of course, I get disappointed. What was I thinking? Why did I believe that, in 2024, we'd see Nirvana, when it hasn't happened in the last 20-odd years or so. If the Linux world hasn't nailed the desktop formula and swayed the Windows masses back in 2014 (the peak of the desktop), why should we expect that to happen now?
Technically, it could. But what stops Linux from succeeding is - Linux. Any time the desktop shows a glimmer of success, the nerds get scared, afraid they will lose their hallowed underdog status, and subconsciously make everything worse again, perpetuating the dependency and the cool-nerd club status. But I'm the only one to blame. I'm the idiot. I tried, for the 100th time, to make the unworkable work. My fault, entirely.
Yes, the Executive is back to being sturdy, nice, elegant, pretty, all of that. If you "ignore" the last two months or so, everything is cushty. But even if I calmly accept that bugs can happen, I cannot truly forget the results. This means, from now on, I must dread every single system update. The same is true for Windows, of course. But there, I do updates sparingly, apps are separate from the kernel (well like Kinoite I tried just this week), and the breakages have never been as severe. I've not had (production) Windows machines bork my mouse, my power management or similar. It's a simple fact. I'm not a college student, I do serious stuff, I need serious productivity, and I need systems that I can rely on, for my fun and work. I don't want to be a collateral casualty of programming whimsicality.
And so, I'm starting to ponder the idea of using the Mac. Not sure if that's the right solution. Perhaps it will be an expensive mistake, or something. I may hate it or love it, maybe I need to become a true believer, who knows. Right now, I'm deeply disappointed with my Linux desktop experience, more so than ever before. The Executive was my bedrock of confidence and sanity, and it's no more. It's become just another machine afflicted by the randomness of the Linux desktop tragedy. Until my next sad long-term report.
Cheers.