The rest of this article will just be issues I ran into in the order I encountered them.

• There were two options for booting from my flash drive. One had a name that started withUEFI and the other didn't. I picked the latter which got me stuck later at the harddrive partitioning step with no indication at all as to what I had done wrong. Fortunately tech support friend managed to figure out what I did wrong.

• The Ubuntu setup menu is too small for large screens and isn't resizable.

• Firefox comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. That gave me hope that it should just work. It, however, is laggy. And the lag is proportional to how large I make the window. I checked about:support and yup, it's in software rendering mode and I can't figure out how to make it use my GPU. Neither tech support friend nor another Linux friend could figure out either.

• I installed Dropbox and had it start downloading files. Despite have an internet speed in the megabit range, Dropbox was running at 20kb/s and estimated it would take a week to finish. I decided to just ditch Dropbox and asked tech support friend for an alternative. He suggested SyncThing which is an open source peer to peer file host. That saves me 100 USD/year in Dropbox fees!

• While in the middle of the previous thing, I tried updating Firefox in case that would fix the lag. Clicking update for Firefox in the app center gave me a We're sorry, we're not sure what the error is popup^(?).

• I installed Gitkraken, my favorite Git client. When logging in, it would consistently freeze and crash after typing a letter into the email address field. I solved this by installing Gitkraken the homepage rather than through the Ubuntu app center.

  • While doing this, I learned that in the Linux world, amd64 means x86_64. If tech support friend hadn't told me this I would have thought there was no .deb install available for my Intel CPU.

  • Also after downloading the .deb installer from Gitkraken's homepage, I ran into one last issue where it wouldn't install until I first closed the app center.

• This isn't an issue but it was at this point tech support friend suggested maybe I should start making a list of all the issues to turn into an article later.

• I guess this isn't really an issue either, but coming from Windows, I was annoyed that clicking the mouse wheel and then moving the mouse doesn't let me scroll.

• If I click Open in the app center to start an app, there's no indication that the app is opening. This caused me to click on it multiple times which then causes errors messages as multiple instances of the app start and presumably start fighting over file handles or something.

• Ubuntu automatically gives UUID folder names to partitions it finds (instead of something easy to remember and quick to type like E:\ on Windows)

• I tried deleting a folder via the file explorer. I didn't see any visual feedback so I tried deleting it again and got a weird error message about not being able to access a file inside the folder. Turns out Ubuntu was trying to delete the files twice and got confused.

• The Show apps fullscreen menu for quickly picking an app to start has tiny buttons for navigating to the next or previous page despite the enormous amount of empty space available. If there were any hotkeys for this purpose then they weren't obvious enough for me to find them.

• The tooltip that appears when hovering my cursor over folders in the file explorer sidebar is horizontally compressed and distorted, making it impossible to read.

• I increased the OS UI scaling to 150% to better fit my screen. This caused loads of visual artefacts for all the opened apps that wouldn't go away until I restarted them.^(?)

• I wanted to play Enigma.^(?) The app center has two versions available. Unfortunately the page wouldn't load for one and for the other it wouldn't open after installed. The solution was to run apt install Enigma via the terminal.

  • Related to this, there's too many ways to install apps. App center, apt, direct download from a website and then also decide between using the Debian or Snap version of each app.

• I noticed that in some apps^(?), buttons would just not work. After some clicking around, I realize the clickable area was offset based on how far the button was from the top left corner of the screen. Changing OS zoom to 150% was the culprit. I switched it back to 100% and instead increased the zoom amount individually in all apps that supported it.

• The standard Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V copy paste commands don't work in the default terminal. A bit annoying to get used to different hotkeys.

• To make an app start when the computer starts, I need to go to Startup Application Preferences and then provide the path to the app's executable file. I would have expected Ubuntu to just list all the of the installed apps and only have the file path option available for more advanced use cases.

  • Discord helpfully has its own checkbox to have it run on startup. Unfortunately it doesn't work.

• At startup, folders contained in other partitions aren't accessible to any apps until I access that partition via the file explorer. This leads to problems for Intellij and Gitkraken when they try to automatically show the last project I was working on.

  • Tech support friend solved this for me. It involved adding the partition to some mount config file. That also let me give it a better name than just a UUID string.

• Popup windows sometimes appear behind other windows. This tripped me up when I was trying to do a screenshare on Discord and the window for selecting which screen to share wasn't visible because it was hidden behind Discord's main window.

  • I also noticed that clicking on a window sometimes doesn't bring it to front either. Usually clicking it a second time does the trick though.

• When I restart Ubuntu, it doesn't remember if a window was on my primary or secondary screen and always opens it on my primary screen.

• Selecting Suspend instead of Log Out... or Power Off... is a mistake. When I returned 30 minutes later, all the UI was corrupted with RGB noise and the UI was too laggy to interact with^(?). Restarting the computer fixed the issue.

Lets take a little break to list some positive things

Last couple of issues