Some noteworthy things have happened in my life. Like when Heather broke the door while she was trying to hold it shut so I couldn't get in. I still can't tell if she's interested. And like Luke and I hiking Mt. Rainier in snow, wearing t-shirts, and sliding down the slope in our sneakers. It was like an odd combination of ice skating and being in the ministry of Silly Walks.
Those events, however important and interesting, are not the subject of this post. Ubuntu is pissing me off, and I don't have anyone to complain to about this sort of thing because no one cares:
It all started when...well lets say it started when I became fascinated with the Google Web Toolkit. You can get it in the form of an Eclipse plugin that lets you just write a Java class, which the Google stuff turns into an ajaxy web page with no further intervention. I can get a web app running without even touching a web server. The downside, for me, is that the only way to run your app outside of a test environment is probably to upload it to the Google App Engine, which I'm not sure I'll want to do.
Anyway, this Eclipse plugin requires you to have Eclipse 3.3 or later. That's pretty reasonable. I think 3.3 is pretty dated--in fact I think it was dated when I was still in college. I think it was dated when Abraham Lincoln was president. Anyway, the version that I had on my Ubuntu system was 3.2--so I upgraded. Not Eclipse, Ubuntu. The new version of Eclipse was not available for my version of Ubuntu, so I upgraded said operating system.
That, my dear reader, is when the trouble began. You see I've upgraded Ubuntu before. Last time I upgraded Ubuntu, it was because I had Eclipse 3.2 and I thought I needed a later version to make JUnit work. I did a full upgrade of Ubuntu, which promptly uninstalled my favorite mp3 player, and broke Wine and VMWare. The later two I never successfully fixed; its been a while since I've played a computer game released after 1998. Also, I still had Eclipse 3.2 after the upgrade. And JUnit didn't work.
I subsequently did get JUnit working, but apparently I never got Eclipse upgraded, because this past weekend I tried to install the Google Web Toolkit plugin and discovered once again that I have an ancient version of Eclipse. This time, I did two full "upgrades" of Ubuntu, watching my system become less and less useful as I jumped to Ubuntu 8.10 and then 9.4. Each time I checked Eclipse, and it was at 3.2. It is still at 3.2. There are no more versions of Ubuntu left to destroy my system with. I still have Eclipse 3.2. I began checking the internet for the reason. Admittedly I should have done this from the beginning, but the idea that I could go through three major revisions of an operating system without getting an update to a popular development environment that is now so outdated that nothing works with it, well that was unthinkable. The entire reason I am using this stupid, ugly and annoying distribution is because I didn't want to ever deal with outdated package versions or library/package hell again. I wanted to use what everybody else is using, and let them do all the work. Annnnd....I was wrong.
Now, my "status bar" -- a relic from the windows operating system that I hate -- is full of even more icons that I don't want. The power button in the corner of the screen no longer lets you power off the computer. It still looks like a power button--still has that power button icon--but if you want to turn the computer off, you have to click on your username at the top, and then select "Shut Down..." in the menu, which does not have any icon at all next to it. So, the power symbol means log off now, in Ubuntu world. This reminds me of something--it is kind of like that operating system where you click on "start" to turn it off. Windows. Great. They also changed the volume control: they took something that was clean and simple and made it take up more screen space with unecessary buttons. Also, now when people sign on and off of AIM an enormous rectangle appears in the corner constantly, announcing that another of a hundred people I don't talk to anymore is now online. I'm actually afraid to use my computer, because I don't want to know what else broke--I mean, got "upgraded." Maybe the new Ubuntu standard for terminal input is Sign Language. In Japanese. Maybe all of the system documentation has been translated to 100% Esperanto, in some GNU documentation standard that only Emacs can read. Maybe my Java runtime has been replaced with the "Free" version that doesnt work. I mean, I don't know. Actually, I kind of do have kind of a clue. I'm pretty sure half of my video codecs are gone, so the next time I go to watch a movie I'm in for a real treat. Honestly? If Windows was Linux, I would totally use it.
The upgrade left me with the following options:
1) switch operating systems
2) stop using the computer for a while
3) install Eclipse outside of package management, creating a time bomb that will erupt and screw up my setup if the Ubuntu people get around to upgrading Eclipse before my hardware decays
4) write about this in my blog.
As you can see, I've made my choice.
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