On Thursday while waiting for something else, I updated my laptop (named dyas) from ubuntu 22.04 to ubuntu 24.04. I had been at 20.04 for sometime because I really dislike the horizontal workspaces that GNOME3/4 forces on users. On the whole, I suffer GNOME3 because… you can’t know the water is cold unless you put a toe in.

I looked a lot at other options. As I whine about on Friday, the KDE/libqt stuff is just so incredibly ugly, and I’m known for Angry Fruit Salad UIs… and it wastes so much screen space. I had upgraded my old klunker laptop (dooku) to Ubuntu 22 before, and I hated the “new” gnome3 that didn’t let me stack my workspaces vertically. (On a dual monitor desktop, horizoncal desktops make sense. On my laptop… no.)

There is a plugin called V-Shell, which lets you get vertical back. Alas, it needs ubuntu 23 at a minimum, I learnt… but that was okay, as it this lack that was preventing me from upgrading.. Two weeks ago I went to 22, and Thursday I went to 24. But, today was the first time I rebooted.

Lenovo replaced my battery in Feb. I had paid for the 3yr warantee on battery (and the rest of the system, and onsite service). The replacement was, in my opinion, a dud. It was 8hr when new, and was down to ~2h when I asked to replace it. The replacement was… 3h. It went up to 4.5h after a BIOS update. This is one reason I chose to run Ubuntu, because they ship bios firmware and utilities to upgrade it as part of the normal software management process. But, still 4h compared to 8h.

After a LOT of emails with Lenovo, where they tried to claim that my battery was no longer under warantee, they finally agreed as a “one-time” thing that they’d replace my battery. As far as I was concerned, their warantee repair just didn’t work, and the replacement should have some warantee. Yes, it took me 2 trips to be sure that it was really not working. When the laptop was new, I’d do 8h IETF meetings … leaving my charger in my room. No more.

They wanted me to ship the laptop to their service center for ~14 days… but I paid almost $4K for this laptop with all the on-site warantees because I didn’t want to do that. The finally agreed as I started to complain that they were not honoring their warantee, and I started to ask to for a refund of my warantee money. I don’t know if my credit card would be willing to get involved (it’s been 30 months), but the threat seemed to help.

So they repair guy with the IBM badge showed up this morning, a bit unannounced, and I left him to do the repair at the kitchen table, and returned to an IETF virtual interim meeting. I returned to find my laptop apart, and him gone… was he in the bathroom? Nope, my son. He was outside blowing the dust out of the CPU fan… and then returned to re-install it and re-apply the CPU heat paste. Very very nice.

I booted the laptop, and battery was at 27% (it was new). Two hours later, I went to leave for lunch, and it said I had 9:41h of time!!!

I had noticed the login screen seemed to take awhile to become active. Weird. Configured V-shell, got vertical workspaces… tweaked some other stuff. Nice.

Got to lunch, and started to do stuff… I open a Terminal… and I get a Blah is not responding, ForceQuit/Wait. WTF? I try chrome. Dies. The terminal finally opens, and I start chrome. CORE DUMP. WTF? Librewolf starts, but also super slowly.

When in doubt, blame apparmor. Biggest disaster ever. It is just stupidly hard to configure, debug, adjust. Just a terrible thing. I really want it to work,… but it doesn’t. A sysctl like FreeBSD’s net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh=0 would probably do much more to help security, allowing many daemons to run on servers with ever having root. Of course, the systemd re-invents inetd (poorly), is supposed to take care of that.

Yes, apparmor is complaining about userns denied. I wander through some askubuntu and the like. Apparmor can’t even be turned off with systemctl properly, you need kernel cmdline arguments. WTF. It was bad enough that policies did not get unloaded when you stopped it…

sudo sysctl -w kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0

and guess what… chrome starts now. I haven’t rebooted with the apparmor=0 on my kernel yet. I don’t understand why this is killing performance. I was concerned… maybe the 9h battery time is accomplished now by having the CPU run at some ridiculous low megahertz? Could still be the problem.

Opening new applications still is taking awhile, but I haven’t rebooted laptop yet. I’m trying to save-as in “image-viewer” to move the 9h screenshot to my “public_html” so I can link to it above, and that’s not going well. You can’t switch applications from the mouse when the Force Quit dialog is up, or the app is broken. ALT-TAB works.

So is it solved? I don’t know for sure yet. I guess I’ll update this blog entry when I find out. UserNS seems like a really good thing, particularly for browsers. okay, I rebooted. I poked around .Xsession-errors, saw “has_option” was not found. What’s up with that… apt-file says no such program. Xsession says it is sourced, so maybe it’s a shell function. Maybe because I tried this other desktops, and started using lightdm rather than gdm3. I switch back… it’s better… but still not ideal.

Switching tabs in the Terminal seems to definitely invoke the not responding dialogue. Chrome works fine. Most applications do not. The not responding dialogue goes away after a few (10?) seconds. I still suspect CPU heat issues. Two desktops ago, a 4-core i5 that could run fanless, seemed to do something similar. I thought I was just running low on RAM, because browser. But, it turned out my CPU fan had died, and the CPU was just always heat restricting.

I installed lm-sensors, and my (16) CPUs are less than 40C. They seem to run between 400Mhz and 2.5Ghz, which seems right.