Upgrades

Every time around a new Ubuntu release the topic of upgrade vs. fresh install always comes up.  I’ve noticed that there seems to be a general hate towards upgrades.  The most common thing I hear is that the upgrade totally breaks your system, it will make you lose all your money, and it will burn your house down.  Ok, well maybe not the last two things, but there seems to be a lot of “OMG upgrades are bad!!!!” out there.  Now I may be going out on a limb here, but I think a lot of people just repeat what others say about upgrades.  I’d be willing to say that a lot of the people that say the upgrade breaks the system have never actually done an upgrade, they just get suckered in by all the other people saying upgrades break your system.  And then it just goes in circles.

Now I’m not saying that Ubuntu’s upgrade process has never broken someone’s system, I’m sure it has, more than a few too.  Nothing is perfect.  What I’m saying is that the upgrade breakage is being blown way out of proportion.  Personally, I have upgraded 5 computers multiple times and I have never had a single thing break due to the upgrade.  My desktop machine has not seen a reinstall since Ubuntu 7.10 was released.  It’s been upgraded three times and it’s still running strong, never had anything break on it due to an upgrade.  So either I’ve been extremely lucky or it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.  I’m thinking the latter.

</rant>

No xorg.conf, I Thought this Was what Everyone Wanted

Over the past few releases, Xorg has been gradually moving away from xorg.conf.  The goal would be to completely get rid of xorg.conf and have everything “just work” through auto detection.  However, since auto detection was introduced along with some nifty HAL goodness, I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about it.  A lot of people are saying that they actually want to edit their xorg.conf.  This strikes me as odd because a while ago it was the exact opposite.

2 years ago, back when I started with Linux, everyone made a huge deal about editing xorg.conf.  The big complaint was that dealing with xorg.conf was the biggest thing holding Linux back from making it onto the mainstream desktop.  A new user would be turned off if they had to edit a confusing text file to get their graphics working.  If Windows doesnt’ need a xorg.conf, we shouldn’t either.  And it went on and on.

This is where we are right now.  Things should “just work” with little or no configuration, but now people are complaining that they can’t edit their xorg.conf.  I thought that’s what everyone wanted.  It seems to be a no win situation.

Gmail: Not that Awesome with a Mail Client

I’ve been using Gmail for a while and I’ve always been somewhat disappointed in the way it works with an email client.  It wasn’t until recently that I tried to use IMAP for the second time that it really started to piss me off.  Believe me, you’ll spend more time pulling your hair out than actually using Gmail with IMAP.  POP3 isn’t terribly bad with Gmail, but come on, POP is old.  IMAP is becoming the new “in”.  Also it was becoming inconvenient for me since I access my mail from multiple computer.  So I would end up with some mail on this computer, other mail on that computer, and it was never on the computer I was using when I needed to go back to that particular email.

If you want to use Gmail+IMAP with Evolution, you might as well forget it.  You can sort of get IMAP to work with Thunderbird by fooling around with where certain folders are mapped to on the server.  But that still doesn’t work 100%. (I’m looking at you Trash folder )

The reason why this is so problematic comes down to one thing: Labels.  That’s one thing I never liked from the beginning.  I rather prefer folders.  Labels really only make sense if you use the web interface.  If you happen to use a mail client, they are 101% useless.  Not only are they useless, but they also completely ruin protocols like IMAP.  For example, when you try to delete a mail in Gmail over IMAP it doesn’t delete it, it just strips the “Trash” label from it and it ends up back in with all your other mail.  That doesn’t fly with me.  When I say “delete” I mean I want it erased, removed from the server, not moved back to my inbox!   To put it simply, Gmail ruined their IMAP implementation.   Gmail+IMAP has now been labeled (oh the irony!!) FAIL in my book.

So I went looking for another email provider that offered IMAP and I found one called GMX.  I’ve been very impressed with it so far.  The first thing I tried was Evolution+IMAP with it, and guess what, it actually worked like IMAP is supposed to work.  No stupid labels.  I was also extremely impressed with the web interface.  Now I’m one that usually hates web apps and the like with a passion, but I really really liked GMX’s web interface.  And that’s saying a lot.