A while back, a wave of learning curve frustration swept through Chaos Central.  One of the tenets of the computing life is that the march of time brings change at a mind-boggling rate.  Most Linux distributions have settled on a six-month update cycle, with almost daily patch-level updates in between.  The patch-level updates go mostly unnoticed to the average user, but sometimes quirks are induced.  But, the major distribution updates bring changes to the desktop decor ranging from the equivalent of new curtains and furniture slipcovers to knocking down walls and repainting.

Since we use our computers for productive work, we tend to keep the furniture and paint to basic office cubicle mode.  Since about 2007, we’ve tended toward running Ubuntu as the primary desktop systems.  Unless there is some very good reason, we also tend to use the Long-Term Support versions.  However, our last new computers (December 2011) arrived with Ubuntu 11.10, which was OK even though it defaulted to Unity, since the previous LTS was 10.04, which had some deficiencies in the WiFi area.  Being resistant to change, we quickly reverted to the Gnome desktop: the new but not necessarily improved Unity desktop seeming to be a dumbing-down of the desktop, and getting in the way of the usual cluttered, multi-tasking way of doing business (we don’t call our office Chaos Central for no reason).

Of course, in the spring of 2013, we suddenly were faced with the End-of-Life clock on Ubuntu 11.10.  The obvious choice, then, is to upgrade to the 12.04LTS, instead of the newly-release 13.04 version.  The default on reboot is the Unity desktop, though Ubuntu now does provide Gnome (Ubuntu Classic) as a choice.  Having recently acquired an Android phone, our first “smart phone,” we decided to give Unity a try–for a while.

OK, it isn’t so bad, once you get used to the idea that you can have multiple screens, and clicking on the launcher icon of a running process switches to it (unless there are multiple copies, but we also discovered how to display everything, a la OS/X).  However, we recently discovered the dark side to Unity: stability.

I had noticed that the fan seemed to be running on high on my main laptop, a quad-core machine with Nvidia GPU from Zareason, one of the few Linux-only system vendors.  Then, while watching a 30-minute video in full-screen, the machine suddenly powered down, due to overtemperature.  This has only happened before when I inadvertently blocked the air intakes.  Not so, this time.  It was blowing very hot air.

A bit of research into system temperature monitors led me to the psensor package, along with the coretemp kernel module and supporting software.  Yow!  The graph showed the primary culprit to be the Nvidia card, which spiked between 80 and 90C whenever a new graphics window was opened.  More research showed the most likely cause to be Unity.  Reverting to Gnome helped reduce the overall temperature, but the spikes are still there.  One of the issues here is conflicts between Ubuntu and the Nvidia native drivers.  We did have the Nvidia drivers installed until the 12.04 upgrade, but, since they don’t support the 3-D extensions in Unity, we left the Ubuntu drivers in place.

All of this brings to the fore the fact that, despite the attempt to make computers (all of them, including Apple, Microsoft, and Linux) look and feel like a big smart phone, the power desktop is not user-friendly.  The sealed-panel model employed by Apple and Microsoft means you have to live with what came out of the box, but Linux, with the open-source model, means that you can (and, by inference, must) tinker under the hood.  The upside is, that, with diligence and perseverance, you can fix it and decorate it to suit your own tastes and workstyle.