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Back on 13.10 release

 

Hi,


 I realize that there are some items from 13.10 that was not really
advertised before the release. As «very very very late» is still better
than «never», this is some explanations :


- 13.10 was suppose to be a first step to 14.04. Initially, we were unsure
to be able to release something due to many factors. We finished by
releasing something, but far from our previous level of polishing. One of
the main cause is my « no availability », letting phillw and the testing
team sometimes very alone :-/ That's was one of my fear before this cycle,
and unfortunately it was confirmed too late.


We introduced some changes that was not well advertised :

- Change in autostart applications : all applications in /etc/xdg and
.config/autostart/ was disable by default. That's was a design decision to
reduce the number of applications launching randomly. It was replaced by an
application to define more clearly what applications you want to start by
default (with lxsession-default-app). With some feedbacks, I think it was a
bad idea, it confused too much people. So, I turned this off by default
upstream, and I'll also do it in Lubuntu in 14.04. That was also the goal
of 13.10, doing experimentations.

If you want to turn it off now manually, go to lxsession-default-app =>
Autostart => Set « no » to « Disable autostarted applications ? »


- Remove lxsession-edit

It was also replaced by lxsession-default-app, all the functionalities are
now in lxsession-default-app => Autostart, but also if you set « no »to
« Disable autostarted applications ? »


- Use lightdm to lock the screen

The goal was to removed the need of xscreensaver, reducing by 1 the number
of daemon by default. However, it was an unfinished work, which was
forgotten, and released. I'm going to remove this, and turn on xscreensaver
when you want to lock the screen. For 14.04, using light-locker will
probably be the best solution.


- Removing lxkeymap, and only use the panel applet

To avoid previous problems with the interaction between lxkeymap and the
panel applet, lxkeymap was removed so you only have 1 place to configure
keymap.


As a side note, most of the changes was done on lxsession, you can also
find documentation on it on http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXSession


So, what conclusion to all of this ? Clearly, we were too ambitious for
this release. Enable zram by default already generated too much problems
for us to handle, so others changes was not properly advertised / tested …
It's not a complain about people, I think I'm the main responsible of this
mess, but we have to learn about this.


I hope I clarify some situations about the 13.10, if you have any concerns
on the actual release, feel free to answer this mail. About the future, I'm
going to send another mail.


Regards,

Julien Lavergne

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