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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.
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...
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?