While all the thunder and lightning that the release of 2.0 created was raging, I decided to focus on other matters, and let the seas calm.
Well, those other matters are now taken care of. The final status is that 1.23.2 is permanently bricked, and the product on Linux has permanently regressed back to the 20th century, when everyone was downloading tarballs and manually unpacking them. It looks like everyone at Google permanently forgot how to create installable debs or rpms, and publish a repo that everyone can automatically download and install from. I do both, routinely. I will personally assure anyone who asks that it’s not rocket science. I’ve searched far and wide to try to find anyone coming up with at least one explanation of the superiority of manual tarball installation. I failed.
But I am willing to admit that my search skills might be lacking. So I downloaded the IDE tarball, and unpacked it. Then ran it. And it crashed and dumped core, leaving a big mess for systemd-coredump to clean up. Not a good start.
A brief investigation revealed that this is a known issue on Ubuntu, AppArmor is blocking some privileged operation that AG wants to do. And rather than handling the error gracefully it just crashes. The problem has been known for a while, and a fix is trivial. But, apparently, an error message, and appropriate instructions for configuring AppArmor is not something that anyone considers a priority. Oh, well. So, the end result is that AG IDE crashes out of the box, on one of the most popular Linux distributions. And this is something that’s trivial to take care of in either a deb, or an rpm package, automatically, without any user intervention. But at least give me an error message and a pointer, instead of crashing. Come on.
Ok, moving on… First impression: the IDE still freezes for 15 or so seconds after it initially opens and restores and paints all windows, at start-up. It was always doing that before. It’s not a big deal, but I was secretly hoping that this finally gets fixed in 2.0. That’s what major upgrades are for. right? Neither VS Code, nor Devin Desktop on Ubuntu has this tic. But, 2.0 isn’t any worse, so no harm no foul.
Second impression: the IDE is not suggesting multi-line/sub window completions. Nothing. It’s mute. It’s silent.
A two hour Chat-GPT session followed, methodically ruling out every possible cause. Eventually we discovered that creating a new profile brings back my favorite completions. Switching back to the imported profile mutes them again. Switching back to a fresh profile, and there they are. Eventually we tried disabling all extensions in the default profile. There weren’t that many. I never installed any extensions myself, they were all installed when the old AG 1 offered to install them, for some reason. Not sure why I have Java and Go extensions, I don’t use AG to work on those languages, but whatever. After the last one was disabled, the completions came back. I reenabled all of the extensions. Still working. Fixed. Yay! But I want those two hours back.
So now everything is working, and I spent some time looking for all the great features, and I wasn’t able to find them.
So what was all this pain, to migrate to 2.[01] for? Tell me what I can do now that justified all this upheaval, and drama?