Updated: February 18, 2025
Let's talk about Tux babe, let's talk about you and me. Let's ponder all the good thing and the bad things in me Slimbook Executive laptop and its operating system, chosen to be Kubuntu 22.04 by its owner, ergo me. Now, I may upgrade soon, but that's a separate story. We're here to talk about the latest round of my escapades with this machine. I got the device so it can do productive stuff, and productive stuff it does. Most of the time.
By and large, the Executive is awesome. It's an extremely lovely piece of hardware. The only downside is that the operating system keeps misbehaving, every now and then. You run an update, and boom, you get a silly regression. Nope. Don't want. I want a stable, robust system. I wanna have fun. Plural. Funs! Well, in the seventh report, I expressed my disappointment. Perhaps today, the muses of source and compilation will be more favorably inclined toward me and my laptop. Commence, we must.
Update-related problems
Well, there were some, unfortunately. First, for some reason, there was a week or two, and I'm not talking about the expected quiet period around the holiday season, during which the Discover showed no updates whatsoever. This felt a bit strange, so I ran a manual refresh on the command line, and all of a sudden, boom, tons of stuff. And in much the same manner I've shown you in my recent Titan report, PackageKit crashed.
Power management issues are back ...
So yes, the neverending saga of buggy kernels and associated woes continues. I spoke about this at length in my past installments, and even wrote an entire article that shows you how to work around the power management bug. This, in combination with a supposedly good kernel seem to have rendered decent results. I've gone from power management working not at all to 50% to fully. And now, with still more updates coming my way, we're down to 85%. Remember, just a few months ago, everything was beautiful, spotless. The wonders of Linux on home devices.
The new problem manifestation (on a fully updated system) is as follows: I work normally, and all of a sudden, the screen goes back. Then, it recovers, and this happens again. A few times. Or the laptop suspends itself for no good reason, or the keyboard goes amok, and the text buffer spews a whole bunch of weird characters. Several seconds later, the system calms down, and everything is fine. This only happens when typing. There's nothing in the system logs to help me diagnose this new weird thing.
Some other niggles and problems
On top of all that, the Plasma desktop decided to crash once, and so did LibreOffice:
The icons-only task manager is great, but now and then, some apps don't quite obey the rules:
Everyday fun
The one-time update woes aside, plus a few applications crashes, all of which happened a couple of months back, the desktop works reasonably well (minus the power issue, that one is still happening). It's a pretty nifty, pretty, elegant system. It's beautiful, fast and responsive. Yes, the laptop is still cool, the chassis is still very handsome, and the display is crisp and sharp. My emotions are the only brittle component in the equation, scarred by the seesaw of unnecessary instability in the desktop experience.
I have my repertoire of goodies. Not bad. Not bad at all.
My new old iPhone 11 shows correctly, and charing properly from the USB-C port.
And here's Plasma inside Plasma. Inception!
So what else did I observe? Well, a few funny things. The system wanted a reboot after I installed Rhythmbox. What? That was odd. The KDE Connect icon will sometimes stay visible long after I've disconnected the phone, if say if I first disable the app's notifications on the phone or turn its Wi-Fi off. Not a biggie, but still. On the KDE Connect front, if you're connected to the system both via USB cable and Wireless network, it will still try to copy data using the network, which seems inefficient.
Conclusion
I'm not too happy having written this report, but I'm not feeling utterly grim, either. I am still bothered by the nonsense updates that messed up the power and keyboard behavior, especially since the Titan seems to have settled back into the good, solid, dependable routine. The Discover crashes are also quite unacceptable, because only nerds can recover from such situations.
But the Executive is a damn pretty machine. It's very fast, with instantaneous suspend & resume, and if not for the self-inflicted wounds in the operating system, it would have been an amazing ride. The Plasma desktop is beautiful and slick. All in all, I'd very much like to hope we've turned a page, and I can go back to using this system rather than administering it. Sure, as a nerd, I like the games, but as an end-user, I detest them. The operating system should be invisible. Well, with a slightly rosier prospect than before, I bid thee farewell, until the next time.
Cheers.