Slashdot Mirror
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?
Just imagine the amount of bashers if the news would had read;
Windows 7 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Windows. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 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 Windows forums.
This again comes from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X releases are properly tested and maintained and tend to be in more professional quality.
But why don't the Linux distros go to same lenghts? It shouldn't be impossible, unless of course, commercial projects are maintained more professionally.
It's Karma - your deeds are finally coming back to haunt you!
me being one of the early adopters that got stung
I haven't seen so many bugs and reboots since the days of windows 95
My upgrade has been quite painless, though that might be because I simply did a fresh install. My hardware is fairly old (Athlon XP processor, 1GB RAM) and Karmic is running quite well. Conky works, OpenGL works, Flash works, etc. The only thing that tripped me up was the switch to GRUB2, which left me, like many others, wondering where "menu.lst" went.
I found that the Edimax WiFi card finally survives sleep mode without breaking.
Blank and flickering screens: No
Failure to recognize hard drives: No
Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: No
Failure to get encryption running:
Sorta, but only because my computer took a dive in the middle of the live upgrade. I had to remount / read-write from an emergency console and run apt-get again. Or actually it told me to run "dpkg --configure -a" to correct it. That installed most things, but I had to reboot into the normal recovery console and run last updates. Rebooted and...
Working flawlessly with full disk encryption and everything. No problems with anything so far, that's my anecdotal evidence at least.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've had a fairly painless upgrade from Jaunty on two laptops and a desktop. What is weird for me is how it interacted with VirtualBox; after the upgrade, my username was missing from the vboxusers group and my XP VMs no longer saw the USB hub; easy to fix once I figured it out, but really frustrating.
My primary desktop at home, a 2nd desktop at work, and before release, I had the beta and then RC running in VM's for a few weeks. None of these had problems. Then again most of this is on older hardware (p4's with similar era video cards, etc).
Ubuntu needs to put a YMMV disclaimer :P
No sig for you!!
I was looking to replace the default 8.04 in my dell mini 9 with the 9.10 netbook remix. I found out that the desktop-switcher is not included in the distro. So I need to stick with the default single windows window manager, instead of the full GNOME. Why you may ask? Well, the desktop-switcher application was too buggy on release time, and they decided to remove it from the distro instead of fixing it. So nobody can complain and more important, there is nothing to be fixed if it's not there in first place. I'll stick to the old but reliable 8.04, for the time being.
I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and everything went smoothly except for the following: 1. My sound hardware is no longer recognized for some reason. I have a Dell Dimension computer with integrated audio, and it had worked fine after installing 9.04, but stopped working when I upgraded. It now claims I have no sound hardware installed, and I'm not entirely sure how to correct it. 2. After rebooting, the screen now goes blank (video card stops outputting) when X should start and bring up the login screen. I'm also not sure what caused this. I dropped down to a console, tried to kill the running X process, and then things seemed to miraculously work. I actually had to get something done, so I just went with it, but I'm not sure exactly what happened (or what I did to fix it). Maybe this is related to the proprietary Nvidia drivers I'm using? Everything else seemed to work just fine as far as I can tell. When I have a few hours to dig through forums, I'll try to fix the sound and the screen blanking thing.
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
I upgraded my wife's system - which is on a Japanese laptop and everything seems to have gone fairly smoothly. I was concerned when it asked me for the keyboard settings, but it seems to have respected my original settings nonetheless. Boot times seem a bit nicer and she hasn't complained of any stability issues. It's definitely gone a lot smoother than past upgrades which were extremely unstable on her system, X often crashing, windows becoming unresponsive, or the arty completely bombing out for no reason.
In fairness, it does sound like the failure of a single individual to get their home folder encryption running was picked up by El Reg and blown up out of all proportion. Flickering screens? Yes, I saw that, but it was fixed by a fresh install rather than an upgrade.
There are some niggling bugs and lack of polish, but this isn't anything like Canonical Vista, despite what some people are hyping.
As long as we're trading unsubstantiated anecdotes, let me say that my experience with Karmic Koala has been perfectly smooth. I have it running natively on one machine and inside a VirtualBox VM on another, and in both instances both the install process and the system as a whole have worked very satisfyingly.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Canonical has made no secret of the fact that deadlines are more important to them than milestones. They shoot (ostensibly) for "usability", not stability.
It runs better than 9.04 on this machine that I am using. This is a K6-3D/400 with 256M and 10G drive. It was upgraded from 7.04 - 16 hours per release.
Issues since 9.10...
Failure during boot get Xwindows/gnome to start. On new log on screen is now a choice of gnome and safe gnome. Just change to the other one and boots OK.
During first boot Netscape kept kicking errors about xorg. Those when a way on second full boot.
Do not like new update apt just showing up with a click. Liked better the icon in tool bar.
openSUSE 11.2 : 8 days to go.
Both Intrepid and a brief trial of Jaunty hurt me badly, now I just stick with 8.04 LTS, the only Ubuntu version that can be trusted. Fortunately backports are plenty out there. 6 months releasing cycles are a joke. Just look at how long Windows 7 has been tested before release.
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
Failure to recognize hard drives: No
Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: Yep. Does not set the new 2.6.30-14-generic as default. So I have to keep arrowing up in grub. I'll reset this myself.
I also am having a problem with X-Plane 9.40. I use to get 60FPS no problem. I get 20 now. Notably I upgraded to NVIDIA 190.42 as a result of the 180.29 issues. But, it doesn't matter on the NVIDIA version. Strangely I found a work around. If I go to Preferences/Rendering and exit out, about 1/3 of the time I get back to 60FPS. My guess is the OpenAL or pulseaudio as it's reinitialized.
Have had Karmic Koala since release and have not had any problems, unlike 8.04 which broke my sound drivers. This release has been flawless.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
My experience upgrading 9.04 to 9.10 Kubuntu:
I needed to make room to upgrade, because the 4 Gb SSD in the EEE was close to full. I have my /home partition on the 12 Gb SSD, so I needed to clean out things like the apt cache. Eventually, I had to remove some bigger packages like Picasa (with Wine) and Open Office to free up enough space on /.
With 50 Mb more than it claims it wanted, it finally started.
Halfway thru the upgrade, it froze and I had to reboot. Packages had been downloaded, but not all installed.
I had to reboot using a rescue USB stick and chroot over to the main disk. I tried an apt-get dist-upgrade and it said the system was hosed, and suggested a dpkg -a something rescue command. I did that and it finished processing the files it had. I then rebooted into "recovery mode" on that version, and did the dist-upgrade again and it finished. Another reboot and it was successfully in a normal login.
I logged in and immediately did and apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get autoremove to get the half-dozen updates and clean things up. I then added back in Open Office and a few other missing packages that I cleaned out to make space.
The only thing I can say is in the end, it worked. I've had upgrade horrors like this before with Slackware -- which I have *NEVER* successfully upgraded. They *ALL* had to be re-installs, which is one of the big reasons why I no longer use Slackware. In the past, upgrades have gone smoothly with (K)Ubuntu, as well as my CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat systems. This one was one of the worst.
It is nice, one running. Very slick, and I am mostly quite happy with the way it operates. The only bug I've bumped into that is new is if I'm running on battery, and the battery gets low enough for the system to issue a warning, kicker dies. No, I haven't reported it, yet. Probably later tonight I'll see if I can get a backtrace and send it over.
My experience would have really stumped a Linux noob. There needs to be a bit more Q&A. I got the feeling there was a bit of "let's push out on the Windows 7 day, no matter what" going on.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Problems plugging in an external monitor on my netbook. Workarounds are available, so it's tolerable. On the upside, it seems a bit better on batter life. Strangely, I'm not seeing any improvement in boot times, which people seem so obsessed with. Until it's under 10 seconds for my netbook, I'm sticking with suspend/hibernate.
The new disk utility picked up the informed me that my laptop disk is in serious need of replacing, which is a nice thing to know before it fails. Overall, not as smooth an upgrade as Jaunty, but not bad.
The upgrade was a bit rough - the GUI system update tools are very prone to breaking, often freezing to the point that only a forcequit can put things back to normal (I almost always use the command line because of that). Unfortunately the only way I knew of to update to 9.10 was using a GUI tool, which naturally broke, forcing me to restart the upgrade (although it was called a "partial upgrade". As for the finished product, booting time is abysmal, pushing past 100 sec. and the wireless doesn't work without a driver (it worked flawlessly in 9.04), and even with the driver whenever I move around any new wireless networks I come across aren't recognized - I need to suspend/unsuspend to restart the wireless system and get the new access points recognized. And the monitor randomly shuts off once in a while. And the mouse (trackpad) moves erratically sometimes.
Either I should switch to some other distro or I need better hardware.
Canonical is interested in rushing out bleeding edge versions of Ubuntu twice a year. Canonical is also interrested in stable, long term release versions, called LTS. Mod parent Troll.
Here be signatures
All 3 to Karmic. All 3 work great. None are even remotely similar hardware wise. As an added bonus the power saving on my laptop works better than my wife's Vista machine now which is definitely a great upgrade.
The two boot screens look sparse and cold to me. I wondered if Mark Shuttleworth was paying people back for the complaints about his "human" color scheme. The GDM window looks ugly to me. I definitely want the old one back.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I've been using it since the morning it came out (before it showed up on the home page, but was on the mirrors).
I haven't had any show stopping problems. I've found it to be waaay better than 9.04. The sound works far better (it used to not work for some apps), as does compiz.
Oddly, the only thing that didn't work about Ubuntu One. It complained that I had a version too new for the servers. *shrug*
I'm using Karmic on three computers, one fresh install and two upgrades from Jaunty.
All of them are good - one is Xubuntu on a lower-specced laptop and it feels quicker, both booting up and in use. The biggest problem was the current MythStream not working with V0.22 of MythTV.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There are a couple things that I'm inclined to point out. First, the article is basically saying, "some people had trouble, some people were unimpressed." It's hardly a scientific study of the quality of the OS. Sometimes the complainers are the most vocal, and the people who are happy sit quietly.
But more important, just a bit of advice for anyone who got burned by the upgrade and are upset: if your computer is important to you, don't be an early adopter. Just because a new version of your OS comes out doesn't mean you need to upgrade right away. Sit and wait to hear what people say about it, and wait for some of the kinks to get ironed out.
I'm not making excuses. Yeah, sure, it'd be better if Canonical would make sure that every release was perfect right out of the gate, but still, exercise some common sense. If you've been doing this for any amount of time, you should know better by now, especially since it has happened with pretty much every single OS. When Vista was released, it was a buggy POS. Yes, I used it. They cleaned it up well enough, but it wasn't any good when it was released. I forget which release of OSX it was (maybe 10.3?), but one of them erased your external hard drives if they were connected when you installed the new OS. That made it really fun if you had just backed up your data to an external hard drive in preparation for the upgrade. And I think it was FreeBSD 5 where everyone was complaining about how crappy it was for months after release.
Whatever system it is, you just can't trust blindly that they'll have it in perfect working order on day 1. If you want to be an early adopter, great, you get to help work out the kinks. Otherwise, give it at least a month or two.
What features do these early adopters badly need that is made available through this fresh release?
Even a fresh debian-stable release needs a cool-down period before running it on anything but hobby or non-mission-critical computers.
You'd expect quirks to come up on anything that is released to a wide public for the first time, being it windows, linux, a media-player, an instruction manual, ...
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Why do people insist on trotting out their own experiences of success on a limited subset of hardware as if they somehow negate the fact that people are suffering because of the Ubuntu developer's subservience to the tyranny of the "Six Month Release Cycle (OMG)." Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
That's what you call working flawlessly? When it kicks you into an emergency console in which you had to remount your hard disks manually in read-write mode and run the package reconfigure command?
Clearly 2009 is not yet the year of Linux on the desktop.
Guess you were lucky, I was less fortunate.
I've upgraded 2 machines from Jaunty to Karmic and both stopped rebooting/shutting down (they hang when trying to). But even besides that, loads of my settings got reset/removed. For example, I've lost all of my wifi profiles which is turning out to be quite a PITA.
I wish I could mod you up. For the record, I love Ubuntu, but I tend to run only the LTS releases. They are the ones that Canonical and the community put all their effort into for running production systems. I have never had a problem upgrading dapper (6.06 LTS) to Hardy (8.04 LTS), but I have had small problems with some of the intermediate releases.
:)
I had been playing with Karmic-server on VMs for about a month now, but nothing production. Finally I popped a liveCD onto my laptop, played around in Karmic, realized everything worked beautifully, and bit the bullet and a few dist upgrades from Hardy to Karmic. I have not regretted it, but if someone does have problems with the newer possibly less-stable software, they should be sticking with the LTS releases. If you want to push the limit, try new software, you can run the newest release whether or not it's LTS. If you would like to try before you mess with your production system, use the liveCD or make a BACKUP that you know how to restore from. Sheesh....
Sorry to the people who have problems, but I'd have to say my system feels a lot faster now. Boots faster, and compiz with all its 3d effects are a lot smoother with on my builtin intel card than they ever were with previous releases. I am a happy karmic user
Exactly. I have been using Karmic from a clean install without major issues, but upgrade killed my sound. Note that I did have OSS4 configured on 9.04 before the upgrade.
One thing I have noticed (and I haven't used other distros to see if this is a common phenomena) is that upgrading Ubuntu is temperamental when it comes to non-standard configurations/customisations (e.g. removing pulseaudio or totem).
Windows: Don't adopt until Service Pack 1
Ubuntu: Don't adopt until 1-2 months after release
Microsoft, Canonical, et. al. are in an interesting position. You need a large number of testers running on a wide variety of hardware (intel, nvidia, ati, ...) with a wide variety of configurations (gnome, KDE, modified sound configurations, heavily modified/customised), needs and requirements (a DJ/sound studio will have different requirements to someone who just wants email). If people don't use the OS because it is 'buggy', the bugs are not found and no fixes are released. Hopefully, they will get good coverage over the alpha and beta phases, then a wider adoption with the enthusiasts and early adopters, followed later by your "average" "novice" user.
Plus, Karmic and other Linux distros are not equivalent to Windows; they are equivalent to Windows, Office, Photoshop and a whole host of other applications, all updated and packaged every 6 months (for karmic, main is about 6.7 GiB and universe is in the 25 GiB mark, not sure about multiverse). That's a lot of stuff to ensure is working on everyones machines.
Because my experiences match that of the vast majority of Ubuntu users.
Just as the people who are caught up in the "endless reboot" problem with Windows 7 are a tiny minority, so are those having trouble with Karmic.
Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
My "difficulties" are that a single plugin for a single program hasn't been updated yet. The author of the plugin has been notified and has provided a beta updatebeta update. I have no doubt that I'll be seeing the release version in my update manager soon.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I installed this on my work and home PC with no obvious problems, and was really pleased with the responsiveness.
It wasn't until later that I realized that Flash no longer responds to mouse clicks. It makes YouTube and Pandora hard to use, and other Flash apps nearly impossible to use. A workaround was recommended, which unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on loading a Flash app.
~Ben
By "bleeding edge versions of Ubuntu" you mean "bleeding edge versions of Debian Unstable", right?
I'll remain with Debian Stable for all my machines for now.
Functional programming... for real men!
On the very poll you linked to it says this -
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
If you want to compare Karmic release with other releases based on this poll anyway here are the previous polls :
Unlike previous releases where I jumped in fairly early in the beta process (beta 2 or 3), I waited to move to Karmic until the release. I also decided to do a clean install this time to ensure I wouldn't run into any upgrade issues.
Unfortunately, despite the supposed "papercut" fixes, this release seems far more prone to problems. On my Dell Latitude 620 (with Intel graphics, mind you):
About the only good thing I can say (which may also be attributed to the larger 500G drive I swapped in for the install), is that overall the system seems smoother and more responsive.
I've had nothing but positive changes since migrating from 8.10 to 9.10. Wireless connectivity is far better; they seem to have ironed out the issues stemming from multiple networks being around in the same band, video out works far better, PulseAudio is finally properly implemented. Overall it's a far smoother distro, in my experience. It took me about 6 hours to get everything working, iSight, mic and Skype, full screen flash, dev headers and software, compiz and conky.
As I lay in bed at night, looking at the stars in the sky, I wonder where the hell my roof went.
People with failures are more likely to be on the forum to see the poll in the first place.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.
I installed it on my Dell XPS laptop, replacing Vista. My only complaint was that it took some work to get CPU scaling to work...but as far as functionality goes, cheers to them.
Is that why the last LTS had Firefox 3.0 beta 4 installed on it, as well as an unstable and poorly supported soundsystem? Im a fan of ubuntu too, but lets not try to claim that ANY of their releases are anything other than bleeding edge beta quality releases. Ubuntu tends to be most stable several months after the release, even moreso than other distros / OSes.
Vista had some really pathetic issues for *months* after it was released. I expect at least these issues will be cleared up pretty quickly. And as others have pointed out, this isn't an LTS release.
People are justified in trotting out their own experience because the summary asks for it.
For me KK is awesome, because I finally have accelerated graphics on my Dell Mini 9. I tried setting it up on jaunty a couple of times before but just assumed that my netbook didn't have the right chipset or enough graphics memory to run compiz. Now my netbook has all the benefits of the Ubuntu installation on my MBP (avant window navigator being one of my favourite things about it, 3D desktop cube and wibbly windows next), and more.
The only backwards step I've noticed so far is that the battery app in the system tray now just gives charge level as a percentage, with no time remaining or time to charge info. I don't think I had to install a custom app for that before. Strange.
which is totally what she said
First thing I noticed was it didn't like the way I'd set up menu.lst. I have two disks mirrored with MD raid so I have 4 OS definitions per kernel - two for each disk (one multiuser, one single user). I don't trust Ubuntu to just update or replace, as it always wants to use root="UUID number" which is a pain in the ass if you ever restore from backup as that always changes with a new filesystem, so I just stick with - in my case - root=/dev/md2. I tried the experimental option to merge the old and new files - which didn't work, so I had to let it carry on with the upgrade while fixing it up in the background.
Next thing I hit was more of a problem. It balked doing a post install configure on eBox. The process went zombie and the upgrade just froze. I had to kill the parent python process to get dpkg to carry on with the rest of it, but discovered that at the end of the install and configure phase, dpkg had remembered the return errno from killing that child process and it decided to act on that by aborting the upgrade at that point - before the clean up phase. So the system is in an indeterminate state.
I rebooted, and it came up ok, but I then found I had three problems:
I ran out of time to play around with it so had to leave it like that. I think when I eventually get home again I'll just install from scratch and restore what I need to from backup. I can't really complain - after all it's not as if I've paid anything for it.
From that point on, yes - everything works and everything boots normally now. It didn't handle an unexpected reboot in the middle of the upgrade gracefully, but I don't know any consumer OS that reliably does.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My laptop, which is picky and prone to weirdness, had no problems with the upgrade. I think I clicked a total of three on screen prompts, rebooted, and everything just worked. I haven't dug too deeply into all of the new improvements yet (no time), but I am once again impressed with how well the system operates.
Past releases had clean graphical interfaces on top of a solid OS. Koala is really pretty AND is still a solid OS.
-Oakbox
Not just answers, the correct questions.
I upgraded to Karmic Koala on one box, and did a fresh, full ubuntu install on my EEEPC of Karmic, and I have had absolutely no problems. It even recognized my Atheros wifi and ethernet cards which I had previously had to custom compile the ethernet drivers, and install backported intrepid drivers for the wifi before, in Jaunty. In fact, this is the first ubuntu upgrade that I have never had any issues with. I have been using Ubuntu since Hoary Hedgehog.
Hi,
upgraded, works for me.
The best news is: PulseAudio no longer sucks. The audio system has been vastly improved.
bye,
Till
Jumping to conclusions about their motivations? Maybe that persons experience was trotted out purely because the story summary itself asked for peoples experiences.
And here is mine: Two clean installs (no upgrades yet), and no apparent problems.
Because when you go to download it, it asks you which version you want. It even explains the LTS thing.
THL phish sticks
Unfortunately when I installed Ubuntu, I let it go with the recommended single /dev/hda1 partition that was 100%. Back in my old UNIX days, I normally would have had a small ~2GB /, ~4GB /usr, ~20GB /var, and allocated the rest under /home. But, being that everyone seemed to have been running full / partitions for desktops, I did that. WOOOPS!
I've thought about reinstalling everything. As you see above, I've always locked down my partitions for good reason. Reallocating a few OS partitions is no problem.
On a side note, I also had a custom 2.6.28 kernel as I was working on developing a USB driver for the NVIDIA ESA device support (which is really just HID 1.1, but, Linux is not HID 1.08 compliant). Getting closer, but, I'm really having to reimplement HID 1.11 so I'm trying to decide if I should implement it as a USB replacement for the kernel or as a HIDDEV/RAW type module.
Troubles... yes... Switching back to Windows.. Hell no! (I booted into my old Vista drive to upgrade my iPhone to 3.0... that took 30 minutes to boot and open ITunes! Screw that!)
Guess you've never had a Windows install crap out of the blue or become noxiously saturated with garbage at book. I admit that the quality of releases in Ubuntu hasn't been as good as Windows during the timeframe I've used it. Nontheless, I've always been able to fix stuff in Linux, while I've had to reinstall Windows from scratch many more times.
I ran into the same class of sound issues, in my case the primary one was trouble getting all of the output in the right mode. The sound card was convinced that the regular audio output was actually the coax one, and it was hard to figure out how to tell it otherwise (even though the problem and the solution were quite obvious). Just like old times, when everything broke after merging PulseAudio.
I was eventually able to dig into the sound issues using tools like alsamixer and manually tweaking what driver I was using to get things working again on the sacrificial test system. The contortions required made the new setup seemed really fragile, and I'm not sure exactly what fixed the issue. That means I might have to do this again after some future system update. While the Jaunty Sound Preferences panel was never elegant, it did at least work most of the time. As you point out, it looks like all of the GUI-based tools you used to be able to do troubleshooting and easily try alternative configs with are either gone or not in an obvious place anymore in Karmic. Given how problematic Linux sound has been over the years, it takes a very peculiar form of arrogance to presume it's finally fixed now all of the sudden, and therefore it's fine to seriously deprecate alternatives that (while not the preferred approach) were sometimes the only thing that did work in earlier releases.
Since there were some other really annoying bits in this release (the awful and so ubiquitous it's difficult to turn off new Notify OSD comes to mind), so far it looks like I'll be skipping this release. I skipped 7.10, 8.04, and the first few months of 8.10 due to quality control issues too, so this isn't that surprising. Ubuntu may put out a new release every six months, but I only seem to find one worth upgrading to every two years anyway. Seems pretty clear to me the 6-month release cycle is faster than Canonical and the community can really deliver stable software in. And that's regardless of LTS tagging, 8.04 was the worst of the bunch and its backported bug fixes were minimal for the problems I ran into; all the awful bugs were marked "fixed in Intrepid" and that was the end of it. I feel lucky that the LTS 9.04 release is the good one now, am hoping things work out similarly to how 7.04 kept me going for a long time before I needed to update. Of course, audio problems with Skype are still looming...
And if you think that telling people to access a command line application will win you users, you are incorrect.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I can barely make out the network and audio icons any more in the taskbar.
Gnome is just out of date. It's akin to XP when the competition has moved to Win7/SL. The UI is simply CRAP. This translates directly to Ubuntu.
The upgrade seemed to go okay for me, but there were problems with PostgreSQL and VirtualBox-ose. Also the upgrade terminal was full of DBus errors. These are things that would terrify a normal user (granted they wouldn't have installed PostgreSQL probably). The upgrade process wasn't automated, so you couldn't leave it alone to do its thing.
Firefox is updated, but has no options, and comes with an annoying default tab behaviour.
Empathy seems to work, but it is a really primitive chat client. This is probably due to using Gnome.
I think I'll wipe and try Kubuntu instead. KDE 4.3 is meant to be good.
I've used Ubuntu with Gnome for around 30 months as well. Gnome is going nowhere though, and it's looking more and more dated to me (not in terms of looks, a nice theme isn't the problem, it's the design of UIs that seems rather archaic, or in Empathy's case you just need to compare it to Adium on Mac OS X to see how clunky it is.
Mine is a disaster. Now am I dropping Ubuntu? No, I'll drop back to 9.04 (I have all the data - I've been around the block enough times to not make that mistake). However, I might look at Red Hat if the problems aren't resolved quickly.
And here's the advantage of Linux - I can move to another supplier, I'm not locked in.
So... Linux is not ready for the real world?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why not test things and then update, instead of arbitrarily picking a version and declaring it to be stable?
"Stable" means it doesn't change. It doesn't mean it works perfectly. If you update something, it's not stable.
Just in case you didn't see the first reply, I'll echo it:
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
I haven't upgraded yet, but, seriously, if it works painlessly, I'm unlikely to look for a poll to post that information in. I'll only go looking to find information if it's NOT painless.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The reason I switched to Karmic beta is that some other problems that weren't there in the release of Jaunty were already biting my ass.
Truth is, Linux is completely unstable in regards to basic things like hardware support. Minor kernel versions fix and destroy support for millions of desktop machines. Extend that to parts of Linux that are not really Linux, like PulseAudio, and you have Ubuntu.
I have never had OpenBSD break working hardware or software even in versions pulled from CVS because they do that newfangled thing called t-e-s-t-i-n-g.
Still, do you know what's worse than Ubuntu? All other distros.
Anonymous to avoid the karma rollercoaster.
As this article attacked the feature I personally worked on in Karmic, I felt it appropriate to respond in my blog at http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/11/register-bloodied-by-lack-of-research.html.
:-Dustin
Typically, I read and respect The Register. They usually run intriguing technology articles that make me think. I'm quite disappointed with today's carelessly researched piece, specifically, the paragraphs regarding eCryptfs.
Lack of automation? In Ubuntu 9.10, encrypting your home directory is a matter of selecting a check box in the installer: That's it. 9.04 Encrypted Home upgrading users simply run update-manager and upgrade all packages to 9.10. Their home directory encryption is not affected by this.
The author of this article found one post in the Ubuntu Forums poorly articulating an issue with home directory encryption and suddenly Ubuntu 9.10 users are getting "bloodied" by encryption in Ubuntu? Seriously?
I expect better journalism from The Register...
The release behind shipping the LTS with Firefox 3.0b4 was simply that Firefox 2 would not have been maintainable for the next five years. It was decided that as soon as firefox 3.0 final was released, it would be placed both in the updates and security tree. If your running an up to date Hardy system, you have the latest version of firefox 3.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I've been using Linux for 11 years. Before Linux captured 10+% of the desktop market share (according to Ballmer himself!) most of the community was technically oriented and ranting wasn't that common. We understood that those doing the developing were VOLUNTEERS and the best way to help them was to post BUG reports filled with details of the bug that the developer could use to resolve the bug and fix it. IOW, the users were the testers. We understood that and agreed to it. We were patient and our patience was rewarded.
Now, we have a generation of users who don't appreciate or care that most of the developers are still volunteers. These users don't care that they get the OS, the desktop and tens of thousands of high quality apps for free. Even worse, they don't want to take the time to take notes of the problem they think they are having and file factual bug reports at application's bugzilla site. What they will take time to do is write rants in blogs and news groups. Rants that are devoid of facts or knowledge but long on flames and vituperations. Thankfully, most developers know about these kinds of "Penguins" and ignore them. What else can they do? The rants rarely contain useful information and the developer doesn't have the time to search the countless blogs and forums for rants about his software. If he did he wouldn't get any developing done and he'd get discouraged and quit, which would make Microsoft happy,
To make matters worse, many ranters are serial ranters. They aren't satisfied with ranting in a single forum or blog. They visit as many as the can and post essentially the same rant in all of them. This makes the ranter appear to be part of a larger movement when, in fact, he is not. There were several ranters in the KDE4 dustup that were identified as serial ranters, and for a year and a half you could track them through the Linux sites as they dropped one rant after another. If someone called them on the topic of a rant they'd switch topics in their next rant. It didn't matter. The purpose was to destroy KDE4, if possible, and force developers back to KDE 3.5.x. The ranters were totally ignorant of the technical issues and reasons why KDE was redesigned from the bottom up.
The examples of stupid rants are almost endless. One ranter registered on a forum just to make his first post a rant against KDE 4.2.1 because "IT didn't have a way to change the menu structure to KDE 3.5.10's." Read the documentation? NO! It takes too much time and he's much too important to do such trival stuff. Ask a question on the forum instead of ranting for his first post? NO! He's not about to humiliate himself by asking a newbie question.
So, he rants. The first reply states "right click on the K-Gear menu icon and select "Convert to classic menu".
Now, everybody knows that not only is he a mindless ranter, he is also an idiot.
The problem is that his subject line appears in some Google search of "Problems with Ubuntu" and adds at least one count, or more if the rant is picked up by multiple blogs, to the number of users supposedly having trouble with Kubuntu (or Ubuntu). Someone takes the results of that search and extrapolates it into a story about how "Some Early Adopters Stung By Kbuntu's Karmic Koala".
Meanwhile, my Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 instalation on my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H notebook with an Intel GM45 video chip continues to hum like the perfect combination that it is. Did I say that I checked the compatibility of my notebook with Linux before I installed Linux on it?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I think people tend to forget that the X.10 versions of Ubuntu are considered to be less stable than the X.04 versions. They're meant to be the version before the next increment to the major (e.g. 9.10 to 10.04) number and it's expected that there will be kinks to iron out.
Since when is X in X.Y Ubuntu versioning scheme a "major number"? Last I checked, X is just year number, and Y is month; and the only stability difference is between LTS and non-LTS releases (and not every .04 release is LTS).
Whas [sic] has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?
The Good:
The Bad:
I would have to say that in my experience with Karmic, the pros greatly outweighed the cons. I'll live major increases in performance at the cost of minor fixable annoyances!
Of course, I did an upgrade from 9.04 so I haven't taken the plunge to GRUB 2 or EXT4. Those two things are still kinda young (and bold decisions for Canonical to commit to production) so perhaps they're contributing factors to the problems that most people are experiencing?
/* No Comment */
Case 1.) Jaunty to Karmic beta. Went to sleep with laptop on, woke up. Couldn't read/write files. Rebooted. Ran a huge fsck. System was permanently borked.
Case 2.) File system encryption brings you to emergency root shell. Running fsck solved it. Unsure what happened because who the hell monitors this stuff.
Case 3.) 64-bit flash is fubar'd. You gotta go grab the 64-bit version from adobe and symlink to it.
The truth is, Karmic was not a smooth upgrade in the big picture.
Ubunteros can't gloat at Windows 7 being a bitch to upgrade.
If you want a Debian that stable, use Debian. :)
don't forget the pricetag :)
... Ubuntu 9.10 was actually less buggy than previous releases. Before my system would crash whenever put into suspend mode, audio would stop working after resuming from suspend, Flash would constantly crash Firefox, etc. None of which are a problem in the current release.
What is this 35% of which you speak?
Let's take a full look of that poll as of 8:30 tonight...
So, if we count "got many problems that I've not been able to solve" as failed upgrades (a reasonable thing to say) then 39% of the users who went to that forum have had unsuccessful upgrades.
By simple subtraction then, 61% of the users who went and voted in that poll had a working upgrade (I mean really ...who really upgrades their computer and doesn't expect at least 1 or 2 little issues? ;)
It's worth noting that this post was made from a laptop running an upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 from 9.04 - with 0 issues. It was actually the smoothest and easiest FOSS upgrade I've ever gone through in 10 years. That includes upgrades through the FreeBSD 3.x line (phear make world ;), Redhat, Gentoo (emerge world - gah!), as well as from Ubuntu 6.x through now.
Props to Canonical, Ubuntu is about the cleanest, easiest to use Linux I've ever seen. Keep those releases rolling! :)
No. LTS releases are supported for longer, that's all. 9.10 is production ready even if it's not LTS. It's not a beta or a pre-release. In fact there is no sign of saying: "Use with caution because it may bork your system". It's prominently featured in the front page as the best of the latest stable. And even LTS have their issues too. The current "stable" version of LTS (8.04) had a great deal of beta software when it came out (including Firefox).
So my point still stands, as proven by many other comments below. I understand it's nice and all to bash Microsoft when it's delivering sub-par uncooked software (Vista anyone?). But this doesn't mean that Linux should be not judged by the same standards.
Disclaimer: I am an Ubuntu user since 5.10. Currently running 9.04 in my laptops and 8.04 in my netbook.
..including the last question, complete with minor typo. The submission asks for your experience upgrading.
For me, my upgrade went completely smooth. I first skimmed through the forum, realized most of the problems people were having were outside of my concern, as I don't quad boot from a natted raided clouded server with 4 dimensional desktop effects resonating off my skypedTivo relay home robotic automation system from the wirleless AP off my moonbounce pringles can home media center rig..so I just adjusted the one thing I needed for insurance, switched to the nv driver instead of the nvidia blob, and the upgrade went fine. Took a long time on my almost broadband (we'll call it "hey, better than freaking dialup and cheaper!). but the net upgrade method worked just fine.
The distro is bleeding edge or close to it..if you choose it to be and demand a lot of exotic action from it.(apparently, my guess skimming around those forums and generally speaking).
Really, most of the problems appear to revolve around the *need* for eyecandy and wiggly windows and whooshing around the desktop. Skip the eyecandy, it might work better. Run some cheap ethernet cable under the carpet at the wall edge, eliminate a lot of other problems.
KISS still works. You want bleeding edge, you'll get cut once in awhile. For what people pay for it, they sure can bitch a lot.
HOWEVER, I totally agree with you on six month release cycles, or even further, WTF is it with "release cycles" anyway? It really has gotten to the point that that is ridiculous, it is a worthy goal of sorts, but impractical. Now seven years is way too long, but once a year instead of twice, then a very concerted effort on bug fixing for a long time before development starts on the next generation, might work better. I just think modern linux distros are way too complex and have so many programs and libraries, that come with them etc that it is just impractical to try and maintain that pace. It is an arbitrary and artificial number picked out of the ether for some esoteric but flawed reason.
Maybe they should put it to a vote on the ubuntu forums?
OR, my major point, just try to work out minor perpetual upgrading instead of all at once? Install once, that's it, no need to reinstall the whole thing ever, ever, ever again. I would prefer that latter method if possible from a user's standpoint. I am not a dev, I don't know if this is possible, but seems like it should be. The kernel can be upgraded and is. Individual programs and libraries and so on are. Whole desktop environments can be. uhh..not much left. Maybe, don't know..
So why isn't the perpetual slow upgrade then the way to do it, why have a whole new "version" all the time anyway? That part I never understood. There must be a reason, I just really don't know what it is. Just slop over thinking from the closed source world where they need an excuse to dun you again for another wad of ca$h every few years or something?
For Handbrake, try the snapshotfor Karmic which has just been released. You'll have to forego avi and xvid, which have been dropped from Handbrake 0.9.4 and will never return. Good riddance, I'd say, but many people won't agree.
most of what follows is true
Occasional pop sounds from the speakers, but audio is working fine.
In
comment out
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
(last line).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1311262&highlight=popping+sounds
Well, upgrading my HP laptop with Nvidia video caused it to display a flashing text console. I think the X startup was failing, and it kept restarting X. I had to reboot into Ubuntu's recovery mode, select the network start, and let apt-get get the latest updates. As I suspected, that took care of the problem. So whatever causes that problem has been solved, but it hadn't been pushed back into the release CD. The hard part was that apt-get kept asking for a CD which I didn't have, until I commented out that CD in the sources list.
Do you use the upgrade function or just reinstall and keep your home directories? I admit I've often done the latter in the past, since it's so easy to install packages as you need them anyway, and packages lying around from the old system have caused me trouble in the past.
But this time it was a bit more serious. I tried to upgrade just using the handy little upgrade button, figuring, what's the worst that can happen, I can just do a full reinstall if it fails.
Then the upgrade program met a package it couldn't uninstall (broken uninstall script returning an error, I think), panicked, and gave up. System was not very usable, so I rebooted.
Or I tried to reboot. The boot process barfed at mounting the file system. Early enough that Ubuntu's "recovery mode" program didn't even get a chance to run.
Let's just say fixing the mess was not something I would want to guide my mother through.
Now that I've done it, though, I'd say the system itself is very nice. Encrypted home directory just works, as do a number of other little things you had to do manually two cycles ago (and yes, those manual changes were the kind that wreaked havoc on the automatic update process).
Ubuntu is progressing nicely, but they need to do more testing on the update function. It just should not, never! leave the system in an unbootable state.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The Register failed to notice the text in red boldface on that ubuntuforums.org page which states:
"*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."
The statistics derived by The Register are thus invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a nonrepresentative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades. Here's another nonrepresentative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32bit, 1 upgrade 64bit, 1 conversion 32bit to 64bit). All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32bit to 64bit reinstallation. Being a self-selected non-representative dataset, would that entitle me to proclaim that every Karmic upgrade or installation was flawless? Obviously such a conclusion would be unfounded, and so are those of The Register.
It's tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installations. According to an unofficial monitor on the official torrent tracker, there were over 16 million torrent downloads as of today http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/. The number of direct downloads from the servers is unknown, and the average number of installations per download is also unknown. BTW, I've uploaded more than 60GB on these two torrents in the last several days from home, and the upload rate is still humming along (I limit each of the torrents to below 1Mbit/sec upload).
It's also tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installation problems. The forum mentioned by The Register probably has only a fraction of those with problems, and that came to about 1400 as of yesterday. Comparing this number to the number of torrent downloads would give 1 in 10,000 but that would also be an example of bad statistics, since both of the numbers are incomplete to an unknown extent or nonrepresentative to an unknown extent.
Systematically incomplete nonrepresentative data produces incorrect statistics. It's the old adage: GIGO.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Speaking of karma, I can't believe there are this many posts and nobody has made the obvious "Karma's a bitch" joke yet.
Just saying.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
5 years? LTS is just for 3 years.
And even then it's still just a gamble by Ubuntu and the users. Or should I say a hopeless dream.
Because not all the developers involved in building the software in the LTS release work for Ubuntu. Ubuntu can't force them to fix bugs even if they are critical, and worse it's even harder to convince them to _backport_ fixes to some old version.
So what actually happens with "LTS" (or most Linux Distros) is it gradually gets less and less supported over the years. The developers just say "Bug? Try the latest version and get back to me"[1], and if the latest version just doesn't quite fit with "LTS" you're stuck with the options of living with the bug or heading to uncharted territory.
With a server system it's usually not such a big problem since you don't tend to change the software and hardware much. But for a desktop system - you might wish to change your vidcard, soundcard, printer, network card or harddrive (to SSD with TRIM for example) within that 3 years. And if the support happens to only be in the latest and greatest Linux kernel, good luck getting it backported to your "LTS" kernel.
Or say the developer totally revamps the architecture of something lets call it XYZ - you could end up with a split - old XYZ for old stuff new XYZ for the latest stuff - but your LTS GUI might not be fully compatible with the latest XYZ for some stupid reason. You grumble and the GUI developers say "try the latest version". So now you have new XYZ and new GUI on your "LTS" distro, which kind of defeats the purpose right?
In contrast, Windows 2000 and XP have actually got better and better supported over the years - more and more drivers were released that wouldn't BSOD the system, more and more software released that didn't require Administator privileges to run (or even install - many games and apps nowadays install fine without requiring admin). Yes support for Win2K is dropping, but that's after way more than 3 measly years.
[1] In my experience the developers too often say "WONTFIX" or "WORKSFORME" even if the behavior is broken. Good luck spending a fair bit of time convincing the developer that its broken and should be fixed. Yeah it's free software, so I'm happy that it mostly works as it is, but still...
I think too many of the bug reports are going directly to a developer. I think they should go to someone like a project manager (with a clue). The project manager can then coerce the developer to "fix this", or just ignore the bug (dupe or user error) and not have the developer even know of the report. Or group a bunch of reports into one bug, or split a report into a bunch of bugs.
Honestly, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing in Ubuntu, however having JUST set up a complete novice Linux user with Koala and watched the things they had an issue with:
1. The SMB mounting tool is nice, except it doesn't show shares in Gnome file dialogs! The connection it makes is not persistent. Nor is SMBFS installed by default. I had to install smbfs then go in and set up everything manually in fstab, which is ridiculous for a distro not to have covered in a cleaner way. That's not hard for me but come on!
2. Mime types are not properly set up in firefox. With a totally fresh install, a .doc downloaded from the web cannot be opened directly, even though it's listed as the type handler... She ended up going to the containing folder and opening it through the file browser, again this is pretty bad not to have working.
3. Sound settings are not properly saved by the mixer on reboot. In addition though pulse is installed by default it doesn't work nearly as well the way it is configured by default as in some other distributions I've used. I've had to sit down and fix various sound issues several times.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting as well, or that she has not seen fit to bother me with...
On the plus side, the regressions in 9.04 with full screen flash and some types of webcams seem to have been fixed (no more LD_PRELOAD shortcuts). That's positive.
Ultimately, the only thing at this point that is really keeping me considering Ubuntu/Kubuntu over SuSE is apt. YaST is pretty good, but apt is better and the package coverage is also better. I really dislike Canonical's insistence on making you jump through hoops to use "non free" software. I am very pro-free-software, however if anyone involved with high level decisions at Canonical is reading this right now, give me a freaking button I can click during the installation that says "I am a big kid, I can make my own choices regarding free/non free software, I'm not interested in making a big philosophical statement with this computer, please include non-free software in my basic installation".
I find 9.10 is working faster than 9.04. It boots faster and the interface is a little faster. The only issue I have is wxmaxima crashes constantly. I can't even do a sqrt(4); without crashing. I'm hoping patches will take care of everything soon.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
My old notebook (P3 650mhz) went from booting up in ~1:45 on 9.04 (that's pushing the on button to firefox loaded) to about 3:15 on 9.10. That's very disappointing. The OS still runs fine, but it ran fine before. At least that is the only issue I've had. Still, I expected improvements, not a near doubling of my bootup time.
> lets not try to claim that ANY of their releases are
... that's kind of the point.
> anything other than bleeding edge beta quality releases
Ubuntu is what it is because of the circumstances of its birth.
At the time, Debian stable had not been meaningfully updated in, approximately, forever. The cool kids were trying out Linux 2.6, and meanwhile Debian stable offered you the choice of the "new and experimental" Linux 2.2, or the tried and true Linux 2.0. What? Linux 2.4? We can't put that in stable, it's only six years old!
Ubuntu, or at least a large part of its popularity, was born out of frustration with this situation. The official Debian line at the time was that "stable" means "doesn't change often", but people were starting to think a new version would not come out *ever*. A lot of people started playing around with testing and/or unstable, but those are really a bit *too* bleeding-edge for most purposes.
Something intermediate was needed, something safer and saner than running off the testing repository (an actual *release*, in other words), but built out of software released in the current decade. Warty was built out of that would eventually become Sarge, but it was built as an actual *release*. This was sorely needed at the time, so it instantly became popular, and the rest is history.
So if you think Ubuntu is less stable than Debian stable,
Of course, Debian releases have been coming out a little more frequently since sarge. Etch for instance came out practically overnight, by Debian standards. So the disadvantages of using Debian stable are somewhat less now. But Ubuntu remains an intermediate distribution, more current than Debian stable but an actual stable release unlike Debian testing. That's its niche. That's its role. And the next time a Debian release takes half as long to come out as sarge did, I'll be very glad Ubuntu is around as an option.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Common knowledge only among a certain segment of Linux fans, not among the general public where Ubuntu ought to be focusing its efforts. When was the last time Ubuntu ran some ads targetting the folks at Bet Buy and Walmart?
Few members of the general public have any interest at all in Ubuntu's philosophy, no more interest than in their philosophy of the company that made their toaster. Virtuous thoughts do not compensate for software shortcomings, real or perceived.
And, sure, people ought to spend some time researching an OS, but that isn't going to happen. People don't understand tech specs or language about technical capabilities. They want an OS that runs the software and hardware they already own, looks better than their current OS, is subjectively fast, and doesn't crash.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Drivers are in the kernel or as modules aren't they? We already get regular kernel updates for kernels, about the only time you have to reboot, and video kernel modules just need to restart X. You can jump around and do that now if you want. But those don't require an entire new distro version. And none of the apps require a new distro version. Near as I can see (again, I am in no way an expert), only a new file system change should absolutely require an entire new upgrade (like happened here with those who chose it, extension 3 to 4). But that certainly isn't all the time, not every six months it isn't.
Really, I am looking for more of a technical reason why the whole thing needs to be done at once, necessitating a ton of things to all be upgraded at the same time, leading to a lot of things that are close but no cigar, the subject of the whole article. It looks more just..dunno..politically driven or market-thinking driven than necessity driven. Whereas if it was incremental by design, only those apps/drivers/ whatever that really are ready get upgraded. Maybe it is all the shared libraries and linking, I just don't know...just mused on this over the years and never read an explanation for it.
And if it was incremental by design, you would only have to wait for your new hardware to be fully supported as long as it took the devs to do it and test it, 12 months is just another artificial time limit. I would prefer, "exactly when they are ready", whatever that time period happens to be. And if the design had an automatic revert to last good working state, then you'd have a relatively painless way to fix any accidental whoopsies that occur. Give you a chance to really tryout this or that new incremental upgrade "thing", to see if it works for you or not, before a full committment and it wipes/replaces the old stuff fully then.
I also noticed in the article thread that Arch linux http://www.archlinux.org/about/ does in fact use a "rolling release" incremental upgrade system, install once and that's it. So, technically it IS possible like I thought, so now I am wondering why they do it but no one else (?) does it that way?
1. Build Hype.--so the number one reasons is as I thought, it is just market driven to be able to "sell" new shiny?
2. Developer Fatigue---they wouldn't be under any pressure at all that would result in fatigue, as I pointed out if it was only released when ready, not held to a drop dead date on the calendar. There is no one developer does every single thing here, they all work on their little niche aspects. If it was incremental, when this or that niche was deemed good enough for the release to the generic public (I leave alpha and beta testing out, most people don't do that really), they would do it then, irregardless of some arbitrary date on the calendar. I'm not a code guy, I am a farmer, you harvest and take to market (a release analogy) when it is ready, that's it, not on some date picked out of the air. Stuff takes what time it takes, that's it. You just can't make this or that thing grow past what it is capable of, and it is silly to harvest too early or too late. You use the goldilocks principle, only when things are "just right", whatever that is. Ya, still problems can occur, but creating additional problems on purpose, like insisting on an arbitrary date for your crop to be "done", doesn't make the other problems any better, just makes them worse all around.
3. Support Cycles--the whole idea of cycles is eliminated with incremental, so I am not seeing the problem there. "Support" would go to what is released. You sign up, you accept that in advance. We *already* get and deal with updates on this that or the other, even within these six month "cycles", I've seen that with every distro I have ever used, and the default in business anyway is to have test boxes. And with an automatic "revert to past good working" feature, that works at the app/driver whatever level, all of it, you can "try before you really buy", or really commit all the way to the change. As to how long support for this or that would last, that is really still left up to thhe devs, how long they want to support some older version. This is how it is now anyway, either they do it, or you take it on. There's no change there, it would be up to the developers to say "we will only support and bug fix back two versions on our app, after that, upgrade or do it yourself". It is what we have now, I don't see how that would be different on an individual app basis with a distro that did incremental perpetual changes as opposed to some version number for the whole thing. So I'd have to call that a wash, a non issue with comparison.
4. Stability.---see all of the above. The way they are doing it now, the current default status quo of major all at once massive changes in "cycles", every six months or whatever like that, STILL results in major borkage, still results in "INstability", else this entire thread wouldn't exist, we wouldn't be discussing it at all if the cycle method worked all that well. Even in closed source, how many times have we heard "wait for service pack 1 before installing"? And service packs in themselves are just a fancy way to say "whichever this or that needed an incremental update to".