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Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Norsefire writes to mention a Register piece reporting that early adopters are having a tough time with Karmic Koala, Ubuntu's latest release. "Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums." What has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?
It seems canonical is more interested to show they can deliver something on time, rather than delivering something good when it's ready or delaying the release until proper QA is done.
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try and transfer a 100+ meg file across the network. also put your laptop into standby and then wake it up. see if it doesn't produce an error. also try and play a video (with pretty much any player) for longer than 2 minutes without issues arising. shall I go on?
This is true. Ubuntu suggested an upgrade, so I went ahead. Now the computer won't boot at all.
I don't have time for this nonsense. I'm just going to install a Windows server instead. Because despite it's problems, I know that it will boot and the upgrades it suggests will be well-tested.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The irony is too good...
Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism...
However, flagging this as a troll since it is obviously designed to invite flames and ire is entirely spot-on. The OP pulls the hypocrisy card and then makes general statements about QA quality with weasel words like "professional." This is not discussion much less criticism.
I had the opposite (I refuse to refer to myself in the 3rd person)...
2 Vista to Win7 in-place upgrades at work (only annoying Cell card problems)
Upgraded Server 2008 64 to Server 2008 R2 64 (had to uninstall/reinstall 2 applications)
Upgraded wife's XP 32 to Win7 32 using LapLink's PCMover Upgrade Assistant (had to uninstall/reinstall 1 application)
Jaunty to Karmic (black flashing screen of death)
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Probably because it's trolling, same as this comment. The vast majority of people here, much less the vast majority of those with mod points and the people who modded the particular post in question, are not in any way "linux professionals," whatever that would even mean. Even fewer work specifically for Canonical, which is the only group you can base ANY judgment about Linux QA on from this article. So, other than trying to score some cheap points, what exactly is the point of calling it unprofessional? All it does is confirm that you're walking into the discussion with a bias and make us want to dismiss you.
I don't use Ubuntu. I don't use this release in particular, and I have no idea what the causes of the problems in question are; I don't know if they're widespread or overblown. I use all three (Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X) operating systems, so I don't particularly have any bias. But even if the problems are real and widespread, calling it a lack of QA is nothing more than jumping to conclusions at this point. The reality is that linux runs on vastly more hardware than Windows does, and those users are much more likely to have non-standard and otherwise more complicated configurations. It's impossible to test on all of them, much less cost-prohibitive.
Further, there are plenty of well-documented similar issues with Microsoft's releases. For starters, how about the entirety of the Vista OS? Updates that hose your system? Non-essential crap foisted on you as critical security upgrades? Pouncing on Ubuntu for problems and claiming it's because of lack of QA, while happily ignoring similar issues from Microsoft but giving them credit for their QA is hypocritical at best. Maybe "Hypocritical" would be a better mod, but in its absence it doesn't seem as though "Troll" or "Flamebait" are that far off the mark.
Yes, maybe they fucked something up royally -- frankly, that's what it sounds like right now. It's very possible. So does Microsoft. Are you going to claim it's because Microsoft doesn't QA test its products? For all the anti-Microsoft vitriol here, I don't think anybody has ever made that claim. Sometimes shit just happens.
At the very least, if we're going to criticize for it, let's make sure we actually know what "it" is first? Comments here on Slashdot are mixed as to people who have problems with the upgrades and people for whom it worked fine. Maybe it's not as simple as people want to make it out to be. Maybe, just maybe, it's horrendously premature to be assigning blame to a lack of QA and Troll mods aren't quite so undeserved as you claim?
Have a look at this gem. Because of IPv6 DNS lookups going nowhere, and the thing waiting for them to time-out, you get 2-4 second delays on every name resolution. Happy browsing!
In practice, people are not amused.
What more, the bug is 2 months old - and it shipped in Karmic, still rated "undecided", and not assigned to anyone. Really?
I also had a chuckle out of this comment to the bug:
I agree it is a pretty serious issue for many and by no way mean to imply windows is anything but a well polished turd.
It's kinda sad that the person feels obliged to "apologize" for pointing out a serious deficiency like that.
On a minor side, there's issue with font smoothing settings in Firefox. Workaround? Edit ~/.fonts.conf - wonderful, just wonderful. When did I last see a /. comment claiming that, no, you really no longer need to edit config files in Linux by hand?
Sorry for being somewhat bitter... despite my background, I was looking forward to this release - not the least because it finally has Eclipse 3.5 in repositories (it used to be 3.2 in 3 previous major releases, lagging 3 major versions behind mainstream...). And straight away I run into crap like this, all while a bunch of /. muppets keep sticking fingers in their ears and going, "it works for me, PBCAK, lalala, can't hear you!".