Ubuntu 24.10 First Impressions

I hit the button to upgrade Ubuntu Studio 24.04 to 24.10.  First impressions:

1. The upgrade process was seriously broken.  Not sure if my fault.
2. Sticky Keys is still not correct on Wayland.
3. Orchis has major problems on Ubuntu Studio.

The upgrade process

Maybe I brought this on myself by doing a console-based upgrade, because I don’t exactly trust the graphical environment to survive replacing the entire OS underneath it.  Or maybe this would have happened anyway, and my caution was warranted.  But:

Something went drastically wrong, and adduser didn’t install properly.  This broke a decent number of important packages, such as dbus; I rebooted, hoping new code would run better, and I ended up with a GUI that didn’t have most of its icons.  (Flatpaks still had them, and Konsole still came up with Ctrl+Alt+T, which I had previously configured.) The solution here was the sequence of commands:

• cd /usr/sbin
• sudo ln -s adduser.orig adduser
• sudo dpkg --configure -a
• sudo rm adduser
• sudo dpkg --configure -a

Putting in the symlink let adduser work for enough pacakages that I got a complaint about not being able to install a diversion because adduser was in the way.  Removing it again allowed the whole process to complete.

I had to search the web to remember the dpkg --configure command.  And I knew I was looking for something like that.  I can’t imagine being a newer user, trying to recover the system.

Sticky Keys

The basic “sticky key” operation works on Wayland now.  Press and release Shift, type x, and “X” appears as expected.  Finally. (I have been “trying Wayland” for over a year.  Even this much has never worked before.)

Unfortunately, the lock doesn’t work… but the state machine thinks it does.  Press and release Shift twice, type “a;b”, and that’s exactly what the result is, rather than “A:B” as intended. Pressing Shift a third time (normally, the unlock operation) followed by typing x, results in another lowercase “x”, because the modifier was ‘unlocked.’

The bugs.kde.org search is being unhelpful for me, so while I found that the locking state should be implemented, it’s not clear from the single issue I could find whether it is known to be implemented correctly upstream.

This is an embarrassment for everyone working on Wayland, on KDE, and on Ubuntu (and maybe Debian.) The feature is supported on Mac, Windows, and X11—and on the first two, we even have an indicator for the keyboard state—so it’s not like it’s an unknowable, inaccessible mystery to the developers who are supposed to be responsible for it.

We are talking about real people’s ability to use the system here.  We are talking about real physical pain.  And we are, apparently, talking about projects being callously indifferent to it, and the people experiencing it.  How many decades until the fruit of this tree is sweet?

Orchis

Based on the hype in the release notes, I tried the Orchis-dark global theme.

I’m pretty sure it’s just broken on Ubuntu Studio:

That is the Breeze wallpaper rather than something from Orchis, and not enough icons.  (This screenshot is from a new user account; there are no preexisting settings confounding the results.)

Speaking of Trying Things

There’s no way to save-and-restore the current desktop layout.  If I wanted to accept the Mac-esque desktop layout shown in the Orchis previews, then I’d lose my carefully curated widgets.

In fact, with Plasma in edit mode, there’s not even an undo feature. If one tries to nudge a widget and it pops out of the space assigned—because, before Orchis, it was smaller—there’s no way to put it back.  Whether or not one quits using Orchis, one must move everything around.

It also turns out that, while an Activity has its own wallpaper, creating an Activity and setting the Global Theme within it isn’t constrained to that activity.  To try it non-destructively, it seems I would have needed to create another user for it.

(I did, in fact, create another user, but the Orchis theme didn’t work any better.  That’s actually the user account where the screenshot was made.)

Concluding Remarks

Overall, Ubuntu 24.10 reminds me of why I had left Ubuntu in 2012 after a five-year stint: I did not want stuff breaking every six months.

The failure of Wayland/KDE/etc. to handle sticky keys correctly reminds me of all of my frustrations with Mac and Windows: pure enshittification, without recourse.

I am aware that, for the moment, there’s an X11 session option.  But, the KDE team wants to quit doing that ASAP, so it’s not a reliable, long-term solution.  And there’s still no keyboard-state indicator for Linux’s sticky-keys, whether under X11 or Wayland.  It’s like driving blind.  It would almost be better not to have sticky keys at all, than to have it so poorly implemented!

FWIW, the session option on SDDM seems to be remembered globally by SDDM, and not per-user. If multiple users of the system have different session preferences?  Too bad, everyone loses!

With such deep dissatisfaction with the handling of Windows, macOS, and now Linux, I don’t know where to go in the future.  Do I… stop using computers?

Should I stop using computers??