This is not another post about the never happening “Year of the Linux desktop”. I’ve been running GNU/Linux on my desktop for more than 20 years without ever believing the grass was greener on the other side. However, three years ago, I reluctantly replaced my Slackware Linux installations with the offerings from Linux Enterprise providers Canonical and Red Hat.

Earlier this year, Canonical decided to advertise the arrival of Ubuntu Pro by hooking up the following message in the terminal as users were issuing apt update: “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: (list of vulnerable installed packages)”. Predictable for anyone but Canonical, confusion ensued.

I can’t remember ever having an issue with updating the firmware of my XPS 13 7390 on Ubuntu. Today, however, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) decided to throw an ugly-looking warning in my face after proudly proclaiming that it had a new device firmware update ready to be installed. To add insult to injury, Ubuntu told me to reboot the system to install the new firmware, after GNOME Software correctly informed me that it had failed.

Today I struggled with an annoying issue concerning the sound system on my Dell XPS 13 7390. Ignoring whatever output sound device I selected, Ubuntu would instead play the audio directly through the built-in speakers. To quote what I regularly hear from my users, “it worked yesterday, and I didn’t change a thing!”

After installing and running Microsoft Teams for Linux on Ubuntu 18.04 for a couple of days, the application suddenly stopped working. Starting Microsoft Teams would load the application menu in the top bar, but it was not possible to get the actual application window to load. Clicking “Open” from the application context menu would do nothing at all.