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Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu
Beuno writes "Mark Shuttleworth has proposed on the ubuntu-art mailing list to postpone the 'Dapper Drake' release by 6 weeks. He lays out the reasons pretty clearly: the delay should make the release a more user-friendly distro. He has also called up a community meeting in April 14th on IRC for community input. Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?" Commentary on this also available from the Tectonic site.
How long exactly has Longhorn, er, Vista been pushed off? Six weeks pales in comparison.
Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?
Absolutely.
A 6 week delay doesn't sound earth shattering to me... I fail to see the problem here, to be honest. Especially if it's about improving usability, an area critical for Linux adoption, which is one of the main purposes for this particular distro.
To me, this feels basically like delaying an extra security heavy distro 6 weeks to implement verify a new security protocol implementation works correctly.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Considering that they want this to be the first Ubuntu release that's supported for a long time and that can compete with things like SuSE's or RedHat's enterprise distributions, I'd say six weeks are perfectly acceptable.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
To be honest, Dapper is very stable and polished already. There's mixed reactions over the new Clearlooks scheme they've implemented but overall, it's turning out very well. I can't speak for the localisation issues, but a stable release is much better than a rushed release. If you want to try Dapper, Flight 5 should be just fine.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
>Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?
there are hundreds of distros already, and the only thing they all lack is polish, so yes.
what's the hurry?
Patience is a virtue. Ubuntu has no need to generate revenue, and if it takes six more weeks to make the release more usable for human beings, that can only be a good thing.
If your a VB programmer, thats REALLY easy:
Sub BootLoader()
On Error Resume Next
CodeLookingStuffHere
End SUb
liqbase
If it wasn't for the fact that Ubuntu is synchronized with Gnome releases I wouldn't mind the delay. But now they would have to either rush the next release, be late with it or completly skip Gnome 2.16. I hope they'll find some good solution because many users are preferring Ubuntu to other distros because of fairly nice bleeding-edgeness. With this step they could lose major selling point to causal Linux geeks.
The recent theme changes are not a step in good direction too. It looks abysymal and burns my eyes. Even tough I didn't like brown theme the new one made me miss it.
I think that almost everybody would agree that a little more time spent making a product better is a good thing.
:) Any steps, no matter how small, to appeal to the Chinese/Korean/Japanese markets will probably pay off well.
:)
It's not just about polish, though. TFA lays out a number of points where improvements are needed:
1. Testing
2. Certification
3. Localisation
4. (last but not least) Polish
Improvements to Asian localisation should help a ton of people - we're not all English speakers.
Not that it all matters to me, though... I use SUSE.
BaltikaTroika
Its not like this isnt common practice in the first place.. "sorry its not quite done' is a good answer..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is the Ubuntu that will be competing with Windows Vista. It needs to be polished.
There is going to be a reasonably large number of desktop users willing to "try Linux out" just before they "upgrade" to Vista. The distribution they're most likely to try is currently Ubuntu, and if it is good enough, they might switch to Linux rather than Vista.
Ubuntu is actually the only distro that works well on my toshiba laptop (newer model).. No other distro supported 1280 x 800 res out of the box.. Ubuntu AUTO-DETECTED it. That was one of the features that made me stick with it.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Got released in April, but the CDs didn't come out until everything was polished? Maybe a 6.05 edition?
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Yeah, I sort of agree. That's actually one thing I liked with Debian. Who cares if there is never a new version? The packages would still get updated. I miss that with Ubuntu.
I have to admit that Ubuntu has many nice useability tweaks over Debian though. Ubuntu is almost install and run without thinking about it. Debian still requires a bit of work in certain areas.
I really do wish there was an "unstable" Ubuntu though. Something where any new package can be stuffed, all bleeding edge junk like Debian unstable. I hate waiting months for another Ubuntu release when I want some newer version of something (eg. Breezy is still using Thunderbird/Firfox 1.0 when 1.5 has been out for ages; inline spelling, yum) and I dislike munging up my system by manually installing some newer version of a specific package.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
By the way: does anyone know if dapper will ship a kernel that's been compiled with the version of gcc that's included on the distribution CD's? If badger had one fundamental flaw, it would be a kernel compiled with gcc3.4 and gcc 4.? included on the CD. People who need to compile e.g. their wireless driver because it's not included in the standard kernel, are fucked, because they may not have network access with the distribution files and need to download either gcc 3.4 or kernel sources...
The biggest issue is that not everyone will work on polish and bug fixing. Some will be working on development of new features. A good version control system should allow this state of affairs, but what will happen when someone working on the development branch gets a major new feature developed in the long six week time frame that others are working on the polish?
One faction will say, "Don't commit any new features until the next major release after this one!" while another faction will say "This is too important to wait through endless patch releases and another major release cycle!" The temptation will be to "just risk a few bugs" for this "major new feature" by those who don't really see the value of the polish right now. The offense will be that "any new feature" will require more polish, patches, or in essence de-values the work the polish team has been doing. Great amounts of spite and venom will be launched at each side.
Set a firm, clear policy about what the polish window will be and about the firm exclusion of new functionality that's independent of any particular technology before this starts and make sure everyone knows what that policy is. Not setting a policy is bound to cause chaos. Setting and then breaking a policy is bound to drive off any future desire to work on future "polish" release work.
I'm a Computer Scientist. I wouldn't know, nor do I care about such semantics.
The problem here is that Software Engineers are not Hardware Engineers. They develop software for the system that is available. No amount of pure software can overcome the shortcomings of the BIOS.
BIOS sucks. If you're looking for me to argue with you that BIOS is a poor engineering solution, you're not going to find one. It's hardly the software developers fault that you (and most other people) keeping buying systems that feature the crappy old PC BIOS. Would you build a search and rescue helicopter out of a motorcycle engine and paper mache? And if you did, would it have the same level of fault-tolerance as an EH-101?
Boot loaders are fragile because the architecture they are based upon wasn't designed to handle them. Want a real solution? Go out and buy a system that doesn't use PC-style BIOS. Get a system that sports Open Firmware, or the Extensible Firmware Interface. And then go and bitch to Microsoft that their consumer-level OS's won't boot on such systems because they still only support the 25 year old BIOS for bootstrapping.
Fault analysis works best when you have complete control over the entire system. Software developers typically don't get a say in how the handward is designed, however, and PC hardware is so riddled with cruft and poor design from 25 years of backwards compatibility, developers working in dark corners like those of boot loaders have to make do with what little they have. If you want something more robust, then buy something more robust and ditch your PC altogether.
Otherwise, don't complain. The software developers in this case do the best with what little resources the system provides them. The fact that the system can't be made more fault tolerant isn't the fault of the developers -- it's the fault that the 25 year old system they must rely upon actively works against such fault tolerant code from being developed in the first place.
Yaz.
Yes. We're not talking a year, here. A month is inconsequential. The question is silly.
And, with a distro where being "user-friendly" is a primary feature, it's all the more important to make these minor adjustments in release dates for improvements that are fundamental to the underlying concept.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't let your anger show. Frustration is understandable, but showing it makes you harder to communicate with. If you want people to help, don't make snide remarks.
Already happened. Debian took three years to get Sarge declared "stable"!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I have ubuntu on 4 computers, and only on the one with Xinerama/dual monitors did I have to do any editing. Nvidia, intel810 and intel855 is the hardware I run. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing an anecdote about how the recent ubuntus didn't properly setup Xorg. I'm sure there are some out there - OEM hardware, piss poor ATI crap, etc, but it's obvious they're leaps and bounds better than they were.
I would label this as trolling.
.conf editing required for Joe Sixpack functionality.
I have personally used Ubuntu on three computers and have friends that have tried it on others as well. On none was any
You don't even need to open a terminal to install applications as there is a handy "Add Applications" tool that downloads, installs, and configures a set of popular programs automatically. For advanced installations there is Synaptic, which is another GUI two click install program that checks dependencies, downloads, installs, and configures all required packages for the ones selected.
Video? Keyboard? Mouse? Give me a break. I've got both PS/2 and USB mice and keyboards that work perfectly. From old IBM Model M keyboard to new Evoluent vertical mouse. All detected and work out of the box. That's scroll wheels, fourth buttons, etc.
Video drivers for esoteric or bleeding edge hardware I can understand. But WTF are you using for input devices Urusai? A serial flight stick and bluetooth VR wand? I call bullshit on your post. You don't sound like you've used Ubuntu. The only ".conf" file I had to edit was my repositories.list and I had a fully functioning system for applications, development, and casual gaming.
The point isn't what we (eg, slashdotters) can do, but what our families and friends can do. In my experience, they can install and run Ubuntu, while Debian gives too many confusing choices.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
This Saturday I helped a guy install Windows XP on a white box using an ABIT motherboard.
Out of the box onboard video was using the generic drivers, and onboard sound didn't work. The S3 SonicVibes card he had also wouldn't work. The ABIT website in Taiwan (after trying to download foreign language support at every page) only had chipset drivers for 95, 98 and 2k. Drivers for the S3 soundcard were the same.
I'm not sure how much else didn't work but he eventually went out and bought another cheap soundcard and decided he could live with the generic unaccelerated video. He's not a gamer..
I don't know why we had so many problems.. the mobo wasn't all that much older that Windows XP itself which is about 5 years old now. It was a fairly ordinary Taiwanese board, and a very common S3 soundcard. I took the old soundcard home because I have used a few of these in the past and know from experience it will work flawlessly in any Linux distro.
If this were about Linux, many people would suggest at this point that it will never be ready for mainstream use until this kind of issue is sorted out. My experience is that I usually have much bigger problems sorting out drivers for Windows unless it's a fairly new machine with all the OEM CD's still at hand.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Yes. It is. Full stop.
Free software ships When It Is Ready. That's why it's better.
All's true that is mistrusted
I dare you to point to even one operating system that you think is more stable, etc. etc.
/bows
ehm... FreeBSD?
Anyone notice that most of the development packages for various libraries don't seem to be installed by default? Not that I've looked too hard during the installation process. But it's annoying to find basic stuff missing to compile a program.
I don't disagree with you that most people aren't going to edit a configuration file. The frustrating irony though, I think, is that most people wouldn't be able to do what it takes to install Windows on their PC, either, if it wasn't already pre-installed when they bought their PC. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to install Windows on a PC and not had it run smoothly, because fundamental things such as mouse and video let alone the CD Rom drive that I needed for various drivers (at times when I'd installed older Windows from floppy disks) simply didn't work cleanly out of the box.
Some people, including techies, are much more used to the Windows way of doing things, and would have a few problems configuring Linux immediately. That said, I'm skeptical that the use of a text editor is anywhere near as much of a barrier as knowing what's going on underneath, and knowing where to find the configuration. I also don't think people should need to understand this.
I'm not convinced that Windows is that much better than some of the more advanced Linux distros when it comes to installation. Its primary advantage lies in the various marketing deals that Microsoft has in place so that regular people don't have to install it. Good for Microsoft.