If you have never had to endure software development run by MBAs, you probably don’t hate the word movement. Decades ago, when I was contracting at Caremark between two of their bigger Medicare fraud convictions. Not their current record fraud, between other records. Look it up, they’ve got a lot of them. You also have to look up MedPartners, but I digress. Yes, this is a follow-up post to my Fedora 43 post of this morning. It also impacts every desktop unfortunate enough to run Gnome. This includes Ubuntu 24.04 and the upcoming 26.04. No, I don’t expect it to ever actually be “fixed.”
XFCE had a multiple monitor bug where it opened all new applications in what it believed to be the upper left-hand corner of the primary monitor. This belief completely ignored what you had actually set up in the drag & drop display preferences. That bug may well exist today. It certainly lived past the ripe old age of 10. Apparently the XFCE developers either all used laptops or they swapped their video cables to match what XFCE wanted to use.
The current Gnome bug is worse and seemingly random.
As more and more Open-Source projects get developed by for-profit companies run by MBAs we get the dual mortal sins of Agile and movement.
1990s
The 1990s ushered in the era of nobody having to take responsibility for anything. Think Bill Clinton and sex with an intern in the Oral Office if you need a frame of reference. You were no longer allowed to allowed to declare a software project a complete failure or steaming pile of shit. Each meeting run by an MBA would begin by them reading an entry off the list of topics and asking the exact same question:
Has there been any movement on this?
The wanna-be management team member responsible for the topic would always respond
Yes.
It had movement.
Some changes were made recently to improve the situation.
QA is looking at it now.
Didn’t matter what the issue/topic was. The parroted response was always the same. Lead MBAs response was always:
Good. Good. Movement is good. Sounds like progress is being made.
The fact is, the Space Shuttle blew up, but all is right in the world because we had movement.
March or Die
The French Foreign Legion is in charge of every corporate run software development project for this was their slogan which project leaders have adopted with gusto.
Real Software Engineering mandates that for every production turn you have a rapid response fallback available in case the Space Shuttle really does explode. Agile is not Software Engineering. They leave the steaming pile of shit in production. March or Die. A shiny new steaming pile of shit will come out the ass end of the next sprint so by bother cleaning this pile of shit up? You aren’t writing better code you are creating bigger unknown bugs at a faster pace.
Amazon has named them High Blast Radius bugs.
Disappearing Application Windows
TDD is not testing. Until a human runs it on real hardware it hasn’t been tested. Shipping untested software is the hallmark of Agile.
This particular venereal disease popped up with Fedora 42/Gnome 48. It quickly spread to every distro that partook of Gnome 48. Fedora created a one line hack around. The correct solution was to install Budgie (no I don’t like it), Mate, or Cinnamon. (I actually like the last two.)
Never install KDE unless you want your entire machine eaten by a perpetually busted/updating PIM database. No matter how well it works at first install, they will push out an untested update for that database which changes the layout/script/whatever in a completely incompatible manner and the update assumes a clean machine. After that you switch to a different distro.
In true Open-Source fashion most of the bugs get closed in the standard manner. Declare the distro version reported against End of Life and move on.
Fixing
Mutter 48 has a severe bug causing the disappearing windows problem. Found it on Ubuntu 24.04, 25.04, and the upcoming 26.04. This bug was supposedly fixed in 48.3 but Fedora 43 uses Mutter 49.4 and it’s baaaaaack.
March or die bitch! March or die.
Apparently Gnome is unwilling to let that bell or whistle die. They just keep hacking at it and pushing it out.
sudo dnf group install budgie-desktopOn Fedora 43 fix it by the above command. Reboot. When logging in, after choosing user, in the lower right corner of the password prompt screen is a gear. Change the desktop to budgie. Do I like Budgie? No. But Mate and Cinnamon aren’t available. See above about KDE.
For Ubuntu
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install ubuntu-mate-desktop or
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install ubuntu-budgie-desktop -y Reboot and find the gear on either the user or password screens.
Let others be the crash test dummy. You’ve got work to do!
