Bugs vs “you’re using it wrong”

Linux behaves strangely sometimes, so strangely in fact that you might have cause to wonder if that behaviour is intended. For example, you might wonder why you can’t use the mouse to position the cursor in the terminal-based Nano text editor, or why the usual copy and paste keys (Ctrl+C, and so on) don’t work there.

These examples are most definitely intended. There is no mouse input (at least not from the desktop) for console applications, and Ctrl+C serves the very important function of sending the SIGINT (user interrupt) signal to console programs (which causes them to gracefully close). You might also dislike that you can’t put icons on Elementary’s desktop, or even right-click it (well you can, it just doesn’t do anything). That’s by design too.

Learning to distinguish these quirks from unintended behaviour is just a matter of experience. There are lots of occasions where you’ll need to adjust either you’re perspective or some obscure setting when you are precluded from achieving some goal.

Bugs do creep in though, and one of the joys of open source software is that processes for wrangling them are transparent. We’d advise holding off reporting bugs until you’re au fait with the processes involved (collecting the right bits of logs, working with patches, compiling code, generating backtraces). But do have a look at the Ubuntu bugtracker to see how these things go. For example, check the details of the Ubuntu 17.10 firmware mentioned earlier at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1734147.