Right. Jaunty is out there, and I've installed it on the tiny little speck of a laptop that my company bought me last month. It's a thing of beauty this little HP 2230s, like a netbook that's been hitting the gym and the Mega Muscle shakes hard for a few months. And Ubuntu runs quite nicely on it, the various odd buttons and quirky hardware bits that laptops are notorious for all work (well, mostly), and it's nice and responsive.

The rest of this post is mostly a rant about a particular thing that annoys me colossally. The key points you should take away from the previous sentence are "a particular thing", and "me". Ubuntu 9.04 is a good step forward for the distro, and despite how my comments might come across I heartily recommend it.

Now I'm sorry, but seriously people, how hard is it, I mean, really, to get screen-switching on laptops working properly? We're three years and six releases downwind of when I first noticed this issue, which is just one of those absolutely totally critical things that anyone doing presentations (read: a huge fraction of your potential market) needs every day. I'm not a business person, but I am a researcher, and the thing about research is that you have to present it. You have to get up in front of a large group of people and show them your work on a regular basis. When you do this, and have to sit around for five minutes on the lectern in front of an increasingly tough crowd dicking with the broken screen-switching config in a desperate attempt to get a mirror of your screen to show on the projector, two very important things happen.

It throws you off your stride. And it wrecks your credibility in the eyes of the audience.

When you are standing up in front of people, the last thing you want is the equipment you're using to let you down by behaving unpredictably. Plugging an external projector into a laptop should work like this, every single time: display nothing on the external output until you tell the computer to do so, and then display a mirror of the laptop screen immediately and correctly as soon as you tell it to.

The Ubuntu screen manager fails miserably at this supposedly simple task which Those Other OSes seem to be able to get right pretty consistently. Plugging a projector into my laptop while it's running either mirrors the screen immediately, or displays nothing, or tries to fuse the two screens together into some horrifying abomination of an extended desktop. It's a total crapshoot as to which happens. If it does nothing (best case scenario), starting up the screen manager shows two screens, the laptop's LCD (active), and the projector (inactive). All good so far, but unfortunately activating the projector in the screen manager causes another roll of the dice. Either the resolutions of both screens are reset to match and the screen is mirrored to the projector (hooray!), or it isn't, or you get the weird mangled extended desktop again. If it's done something you didn't like, clicking the "mirror screens" checkbox either fixes it, or causes the system to throw an error and crash the screen manager. In addition to this mess, during your wrangling of the screen manager it will simply shut down at random points, displaying a message asking you to log out and back in again to confirm the screen settings. I've learned from bitter experience never to do this, unless you want to start all over again from scratch. By now, sweat is streaming down your face and you can feel the audience warming up their throwing arms and reaching into their conference packs for the complimentary bag of rotten tomatoes.

An additional annoyance is waiting to plague you after you've finished your presentation and mercifully retreated to the isolation of your hotel room or office. Ubuntu is now thoroughly confused as to whether or not you have an external monitor connected. Every few startups subsequently, it will suddenly pick up some combination of the settings you button-mashed while trying to get your presentation running and attempt to apply them. This has resulted in at least the following happening (by no means an exhaustive list):

• The laptop starting up in mirrored mode with only the external screen activated (i.e. a blank LCD).
• The laptop starting up locked in mirrored mode, meaning I'm unable to set the LCD resolution above 1024x768.
• The laptop starting up thinking it has an extended desktop, causing me to lose windows off the side of the screen until I realise what's happening.

Further soul-destroying fighting with the screen manager is required to revert the laptop to realising that no, actually, there is no external projector or screen plugged in, and yes, the LCD is all it has to worry about.

It amazes me that something this fundamental (and this long-standing) is still so broken in Ubuntu. It's a real deal breaker for me, since it means that I have to maintain a dual boot setup for doing presentations, at least on my laptop.