A while back I went abroad and got to enjoy an internet without the Great Firewall. Then I came home and my laptop started crashing like it had caught a virus. First the DNS service wouldn’t start, then the network died, and finally the kernel panicked. After a whole lot of fiddling I got it barely running, but it felt like the system was on life support. So I decided to reinstall. Reinstalling is not a simple matter for me, because I run Ubuntu Unity, and Ubuntu has abandoned Unity. There’s no derivative left either — someone did maintain an Ubuntu Unity image, but that maintainer got cancer, and coding from a wheelchair every day is no joke. In the end I had to rely on myself and install a “clean” Ubuntu Unity 18.04.2 step by step.

On Ubuntu Unity 18.04, the default datetime format is pretty weird. If you enable the weekday display, it shows “三” instead of “星期三”. So you have to change it.

A few days ago I had dinner with some big shot from Beijing, and we got to talking about whether GNOME Shell is shit or not these days… We arrived at the same conclusion: GNOME Shell is a piece of shit. And it’s not just that “GNOME Shell itself” is shit — it’s more that “the whole pack of shitty GNOME Shell developers” is shit. GNOME Shell has been talking about supporting fractional scaling since last year. The feature was already mostly done last year, with only final fixes left. It was supposed to ship in GNOME Shell 3.26, but they ran out of time and it slipped to GNOME Shell 3.28. The GNOME devs even wrote a blog post bragging about how amazing GNOME is, how it has every feature, fractional scaling included. Yet a year later, with GNOME Shell 3.28 Beta about to be released, the fractional scaling feature is still nowhere to be seen. Is nobody working on it? Of course not!

A recent batch of Unity and Compiz updates landed on Ubuntu 16.04, and it broke my fractional scaling. Someone already filed a bug, but nobody seems to give a shit. So what do you do? Roll back, obviously. Except rolling back Unity isn’t that simple — too many dependencies, plus core components like Compiz. If you’re going to roll back, you might as well go big.

If you use Firefox in fullscreen as much as I do, you’ve probably hit the same problem I have. What happens is this: while I’m browsing fullscreen in Firefox, I click some other popup window and it opens underneath Firefox instead of coming to the front. WiFi status, uploading images to Weibo, all sorts of stuff. And it only happens under Unity. Annoying as hell. Well, there’s a fix now.

One reason I like using the Unity desktop is its indicators and global menu. But sometimes the damn thing fails to start and stuff just doesn’t show up — the clock, the volume speaker icon, that kind of thing. Logging out and back in fixes it, but I was in the middle of a Dota 2 update and didn’t want to do that, so I went looking for another way.

As of right now, Ubuntu Linux still ships Empathy as its default IM client. I won’t go into how bad that thing is, but at the very least it doesn’t even support proxies, so Pidgin is the only way to get things working properly. Pidgin on Unity already supports integration with the indicator-message in the top-right corner, but there’s one important feature it hasn’t integrated: showing the unread message count on the dock icon, the way Empathy does. In fact, someone made support for this a long time ago, it’s just that it’s only recently gotten on track. If you’re on Ubuntu 14.10 or later, you’ll find this plugin in your Pidgin install.