Comments on: Two simple suggestions to improve Ubuntu

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:49:08 +0000

Yeah, that’s frustrating. The same thing happened to a friend of mine. Out of curiosity, what was the wireless model?

-c

By: Ron Herring

Ron Herring — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:28:16 +0000

My biggest gotcha came from the fact that something that worked before (my wifi card) got broken in the new release. The solution offered was “that manufacturer doesn’t provide sufficient information to resolve the issue because this is proprietary information”. If that was true, why did it work in the previous version? So I downgraded the machine so it would at least work! Incidentally, the “broken” part was that it would NOT connect to any router using channel 6 – any other channel worked fine. Returning to the previous version fixed the problem. Strange, but true. But the response itself was a big irritant, since it was patently untrue.
Also, the network manager in the new release was itself broken, so I had to manually set the network parameters! Having been a Linux user since 1995 (and Unix admin since 1977), this was yet another big disappointment.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:40:55 +0000

Pretty much. It’s built from Debian unstable (Sid), then they try and fix issues with it. Lucid will be based on Debian testing apparently, not Sid.

By: Samantha Mathews

Samantha Mathews — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:49:53 +0000

That’s why I move to debian since ubuntu looks flimsy. I’ve hearded people say ubuntu is a special distribution of unstable debian, right?

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:08:54 +0000

Hi Thang,

Not at all. It doesn’t change anything really. Ubuntu is still released every 6 months, just that for some people that 6 month upgrade frame will be a month or so later than everyone else, but it’s still the same amount of time.

Also, Ubuntu will still release early to get it to the people who need to test it (and use it if they want to).

This does raise another interesting questions – what is “early and often” in this context? Is once a year often? Is 12 times a year often? The definition of how early and how often must change depending on the open source project. Perhaps one release every 6 months is too often.

-c

By: Thang Pham Duy

Thang Pham Duy — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:44:12 +0000

Hi Chris,

Do you agree that your second suggest confict with the OS philosophy: release early, release often?

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:57:35 +0000

Yeah, the delay doesn’t guarantee a flawless upgrade, of course. It should however improve the experience, giving the best possible chance of a more successful upgrade.

By: UndiFineD

UndiFineD — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:51:14 +0000

Hello, I think you are absolutely right.

I upgraded to karmic even before offical release time,
and have filed some bugs. that was a month ago.
as an experianced user you can life with that and move on.

now the official release has been made and upgrades fixed some issues
for me, great. the experianced people can life and move on, but their systems are no garrantuees for other home users with lesser experiance and different kinds of hardware.

an upgrade delay for lesser experianced user I do recommend, but it is no promise for flawless upgrades.

By: Gireesh

Gireesh — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:51:46 +0000

In my laptop, Karmic hung each time I open a window (the first window after login to GNOME session). I found a workaround to this.. login using GNOME failsafe session once. From next login onwards, I can login using normal GNOME; I don’t see any issue.

By: phloidster

phloidster — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:43:03 +0000

Chris is right. The first comment is wrong.

Time based releases are evil. Period.

Quality and stability matter far more than many in the linux ‘community’ seem to understand.