Hey Ubuntu, Stop Making Linux Look Bad
It’s the same old story. A new Ubuntu release, a new series of pain and frustration.Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months, come what may. Unfortunately what most often comes is a system full of bugs, pain, anguish, wailing and gnashing of teeth - as many “early” adopters of Karmic Koala have discovered.
The problem is, Ubuntu makes Linux look bad. As more and more peoplemake the switch to free software this is not a good thing. Linux ismeant to be stable, secure, reliable.
On the other hand, Ubuntu is obviously doing a lot right. People areindeed switching to Linux, and most of these users have come from anoperating system far more torturous, but what they arrive to doesn’thave to be the way it is. Indeed, it shouldn’t be that way.
You see, “With great power comes great responsibility” and now thatUbuntu is very popular it really has a responsibility to create qualityproducts.
As usual, some things which were broken in the previous release are now fixed, but things which wereworking are now broken. A friend of mine has two wireless USB devices.One works on 9.04 while the other one doesn’t, which is fair enough.With 9.10 however, the one which wasn’t working now works, but the onewhich was working now doesn’t. Come again? It’s not the first timeeither. Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 his TV tuner cards which used towork, then stopped.
There’s gotta be a better way to do this.
With each new release comes new features, newer software, yet somehow things go backwards. Free software is supposed to improvewith each new release. Take OS X, which gets faster. Cleaner. Better.Sure, they have a much smaller hardware base to work on, but it can bedone. Ubuntu with the potential for thousands of developers surely cando a better job? Or at least, surely it could at least move forward??
Perhaps Ubuntu’s success is also its curse. They came to fame bymaking the hard things easier and as such have done great things forthe Linux desktop. When you introduce components like proprietarysoftware however, things get more complicated. Sure, Jockey (theproprietary driver manager) warns that Ubuntu “cannot improve or fixthese third party drivers,” but does the average user really know whatthat means? All they know is that their entire (supposedly stable)Linux box hard locks each time they log out or switch users.
Personally, upgrading a recent Jaunty install to Karmic entirelybroke networking on the box. Meanwhile, a fresh Kubuntu 32bit installwouldn’t boot with a broken GRUB2 configuration and booting to the LiveCD then hard locked the machine. On another machine, half-way through afresh Ubuntu 64 bit install, the video card suddenly started to displayartefacts on the screen. A power off and reboot and it’s still broken.Coincidence? Maybe.
Other people experience awesome features like broken graphics,crashing installer, misconfigured boot loader, USB drives not mounting,sound not working, broken wireless, the list goes on. Upgrading is sobad that a majority of the advice is to perform a fresh install. Infact, the entire term “early adopter” refers to the fact that mostexperienced Ubuntu users upgrading to the latest version will always wait at least a monthbefore doing so, in order to ensure most major bugs are fixed. Is thisseriously acceptable? Is this what you expect from a Linux system?Surely this is some kind of morbid, ironic joke.
Ubuntu is starting to make dents in the commercial arena and that’s great, but do we really need fancy new features like Ubuntu One when basic functionality (that quite frankly should be solved in the 21st century) doesn’t work as expected? Isn’t Ubuntu supposed to “Just Work”™?
Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the release notes for 9.10 and read the 40 odd bugs for this “stable” operating system:
[*]Boot from degraded RAID array broken
[*]File system corruption with so called “large files” over 512MB
[*]Hibernation unavailable with automatic partitioning
[*]Kubuntu package manager does not warn about installing from unsigned package repositories
[*]No USB devices work on MSI Wind netbooks, plus flickering graphics
[*]No Xv support for Intel graphics
[*]Samba nmbd daemon not started during boot
[*]System won’t boot with converted ext4 file system
[*]Ubuntu Netbook Remix missing shutdown applet
[*]Ubuntu One client corrupts data
[*]Wireless kill switch segfaults kernel
[*]X server crashes when using a Wacom tablet
[*]..and others (plus more discovered after release).
You must be joking.
A poll on the Ubuntu forums shows just 10% of people had a flawless install. Now that’s something to be proud of! Still not convinced? Try it yourself.
They say, “What goes around comes around.” If Ubuntu doesn’t gettheir act together then they will be eclipsed by other distros, andrightfully so. What’s worse about all this, is that Karmic Koala hadbeen talked up so much. “It’s a Windows 7 killer” and all that, whichof course we’ve heard before. Shuttleworth boasts that he is even“looking forward” to the battle with Microsoft. In the face ofMicrosoft’s latest effort, just when Linux needed a knight in shiningarmor and a prime example of how amazing free software is we get, ah,Ubuntu. Hurrah.
Many years ago Linux was very command line focused (and still canbe, thank goodness). Back then, many Windows users tried Linux and werescared off, never to try Linux again having been so deeply scarred bythat initial experience. It’s happening again, except that this timemany of the things which are great about Linux that are touted by thecommunity are being destroyed. Linux is stable, it doesn’t crash.Whoops, Ubuntu just hard locked my machine. Whoops, Firefox is nolonger starting up for some reason, whoops this package is now broken.Gah!
Canonical is not an open source company, they are just using freesoftware to try and get a slice of the huge operating system market.Even so, one of Shuttleworth’s primary goals for Ubuntu is for it to beas good as OS X. With releases like Karmic Koala, they aren’t going toget there any time soon, especially when Apple is releasing excellentbug fix-only versions like Snow Leopard. Get your act together, becausewhile Ubuntu might be gaining brave new users who have it worse onWindows, it just doesn’t cut it for experienced Linux users.
Of course these sort of issues are not limited to Ubuntu, but itcertainly seems to have more than its fair share. Perhaps it’s thewhole commercially driven “release on time” philosophy, or maybe therearen’t enough beta testers. Then again, Fedora has been pushing thelimits more than Ubuntu recently and has introduced far more features,yet has had much more successful releases. Something is very wrong withUbuntu’s release cycle.
Perhaps it’s just Karma, or perhaps the mascot too greatlyepitomizes this release. Koalas are after all, very lazy beasts whosleep most of the time (and they don’t drink at all). Drop bears on the other hand..
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