Thinking of the phrase “never change a running system” I am usually not very keen on updating my Ubuntu system to a new distribution. However, not every new software version is available from the backports, so finally, I saw myself forced to upgrade to Karmic Koala.

I instantly regretted it. Of course, I appreciate all the new software, but as in every upgrade I ever made (and I probably should know by now -.-), there are a few things that were annoying me or are still doing it:

• kaffeine-1.0~pre is not even as useful as 0.8.7 from jaunty: While staying in touch with the main KDE (4) line, the developers seemed to completely remove the Playback -> Video menu, so it is not possible anymore to toggle deinterlacing, or any other video filter, which is very annoying for DVB-T. I filed a bug report on that. Futhermore, my DVB-T channels were lost, so I had to rescan them.

• The notifications displayed by notify-osd somehow have wandered from the upper right edge towards the middle right. This seems to be fixed now, as pointed out in the bug report, but somehow this fix never got onto my system, though the changelog of notify-osd says so… Additionally, the notifications for received messages in Pidgin do not hide anymore if I actually read the messages, they persist until their default timeout has elapsed. And they even show up now when my IM status is on “Do not Disturb” – this was not the case (just as I expected it) in jaunty.

• Icons in GTK menus are now hidden by default, which seemed very unfamiliar to me, since I always used them as an orientation guide, especcially in the Firefox search plugin menu. You can show them again in the System -> Preferences -> Appearance applet on the Interface tab by selecting “Show icons in menus”.

• GDM is no longer customizable through themes. It just doesn’t support it, as it seems to be a complete rewrite. IMHO just another Unmature Software Thing.

  Edit: I just found out that it is also not able to start GDM in Xnest, as I usually did for testing:

  $ gdmflexiserver --xnest
  ** (gdmflexiserver:5916): WARNING **: Not yet implemented
  

• And finally, my customized GNOME window theme (based on Clearlooks) was broken I am very confident that the color of selected text was not the same color in the title bar, but now both seem to be the same color. This is really bad, as for the title bar, I used to have a darker shade of orange than for selected text. OK, changing to another theme may be simple, but until now, I haven’t found anything I like best.