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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's Karma - your deeds are finally coming back to haunt you!
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...
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Canonical has made no secret of the fact that deadlines are more important to them than milestones. They shoot (ostensibly) for "usability", not stability.
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
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.
Funny, and all this time I thought the majority of the reason people use Windows is because it comes pre-installed on all the computers that they buy. The fact it 'just works' is because the people who make the systems have already prebuilt the systems with a tested and verified image that works on that specific hardware being purchased.
If they did the same with Linux, which some distributions do, then it would 'just work' as well.
I mean, get real. Can you imagine grandma getting a barebone system and installing Windows 7/Vista/Xp from cd, then having to search the internet for the drivers required for the hardware that isn't automatically recognized?
Pretty much the same headache grandma would have looking for any missing linux drivers, and funny enough, in a bare-bone install, linux is likely to support more out of the box than Windows. Go figure.
So for the 'lack of tinkering', you have to thank Microsoft and their excellent marketing division and their stranglehold on the hardware corporation.
Cheers.
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
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."
Right. That's why I'm still running XP on the Windows side of the box and have no plans whatsoever -- nor really any motivation -- to upgrade to Windows 7. And the next box will likely be running XP under virtualization. Odds are that it will be quite some time before there is any significant Windows software that won't run under XP.
You can bandy the word "professionalism" around with all of its varied meanings and hope that no one here is literate enough to call you on it -- this is Slashdot, after all -- but the fact of the matter is that the only relevant aspect of professionalism here is the amount of money involved. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you can afford to test your software on a wide variety of machines with a large QA staff to run the whole exercise. Microsoft and Apple have the billions; Canonical does not.
All that said, there are any number of free software packages out there that are polished and refined and blow away their commercial competitors, so it plainly can be done. On the other hand, an operating system and all of its associated software is a lot more complicated than any single application, so testing it thoroughly has got to be a daunting task. Moreover, the risk and effort involved in downloading the latest Firefox beta is much less than downloading and installing an operating system beta, so there are probably a lot more testers for apps than OS distributions. Still, the last couple of Ubuntu releases have had non-trivial problems, and for a distribution that prides itself on stability, this definitely should serve as a wakeup call to the folks at Canonical.
In the end, though, I'll take a rough start on an Ubuntu point revision over the "professionalism" of Windows Vista and, for that matter, the rough start that many people have reported with Windows 7. And while I'll grant you that OS X is a polished product, several OS X releases have had noteworthy issues, and that doesn't even begin to cover the primitive suckware that passed for the MacOS pre-OS X. Modern operating system development is hard. Neither commercial nor free OS producers do it as well as we'd like. Even so, how much do you want to bet that there are fixes for the problems with Ubuntu 9.10 a good six months to a year before Microsoft issues its first service pack for Windows 7?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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 :
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
Make sure your GRUB shows the new 2.6.31 kernel. When I upgraded, the kernel installed, but it didn't run update-grub, and so my GRUB menu didn't show the new kernel. When it booted into the old kernel, I had the same problem as you, where it showed that no audio devices were installed. Merely booting into the proper new kernel fixed it.
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...