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Is Ubuntu Heading Down Microsoft's Release Path?
Each time I try a new Ubuntu release I notice nagging issues related to product quality. I wonder: Will Canonical need to change its approach and use a development schedule more like Microsoft's? Here's why I'm concerned |
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Comments (32)
12 earlier comments in the full thread.
>> I want to have the core system to be separate from the apps.
>What does that mean?
This means he want to be able to DL tarballs of the latest releases of the software he uses like Gimp, that is being updated on a fast and furious pace, and compile them on his system, without waiting for the rest of the distro to be updated.
This means he want to be able to DL tarballs of the latest releases of the software he uses like Gimp, that is being updated on a fast and furious pace, and compile them on his system, without waiting for the rest of the distro to be updated.
> This means he want to be able to DL tarballs of the latest releases of the software he uses like Gimp, that is being updated on a fast and furious pace, and compile them on his system, without waiting for the rest of the distro to be updated.
I'll have to plead ignorance on that one. I'm running GIMP 2.6.4. In fact, I've got the latest version of every app that I regularly use. If you use Ubuntu that is probably not possible, but that's not really Ubuntu's market. You can run Debian Sid, Sidux, Arch, Slackware, Sabayon, or others if you want the very latest releases of apps. My guess is that the list of apps for which, say, Arch doesn't have the latest version would be very small.
I'll have to plead ignorance on that one. I'm running GIMP 2.6.4. In fact, I've got the latest version of every app that I regularly use. If you use Ubuntu that is probably not possible, but that's not really Ubuntu's market. You can run Debian Sid, Sidux, Arch, Slackware, Sabayon, or others if you want the very latest releases of apps. My guess is that the list of apps for which, say, Arch doesn't have the latest version would be very small.
Quoting:I want to have the core system to be separate from the apps.
I understand what you mean, it would be nice to have a stable underlying system, especially if the kernel supports your hardware well, but to have the newest version of the applications.
I was able to do that with OpenOffice 3.0 on intrepid. It is a testing version, but it is stable. I added this:
Quoting:deb http:/ /ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid mainto my sources.list file. (minus the space between the //)
I don't know if this is available for other applications or not as I was only interested in getting OO.o 3.
> it would be nice to have a stable underlying system, especially if the kernel supports your hardware well, but to have the newest version of the applications.
But how is that different from Slackware or Fedora?
But how is that different from Slackware or Fedora?
Quoting: If you want stable, run LTS. If you don't use LTS, don't complain that it's not stable.
I hope you were joking. But if not....
That is complete BS. There is another thread ripping through the KDE folks for releasing KDE 4 as a final product when they knew it was still beta quality, just to get more testers. If Ubuntu calls their product final, users should expect final quality.
Perhaps Ubuntu needs to pull a Red Hat...one stable enterprise version (Red Hat), one testing bleeding edge version (Fedora). Release a new stable every 18-24 months, release a new test every 6 months. Tons of people use Fedora, tons of people would use Ubuntu-testing. Ubuntu could be very daring in that distro, while making the enterprise version very much boring and stable.
Ubuntu is hardly daring, their release model, pull debian Sid/Experimental and massage into functional, leaves them 3 to 4 month stale upon initial release and almost a year stale by the time the next release rolls out. As for stability, look where they are pulling the lions share of their packages from.
Defense of love of your distro is one thing, but not acknowledging the warts does not mean that they are not there. Granted the fingers in the ears and singing lalalalala does work as a distractor as the rest of us are either laughing or trying to speak louder to get through. Please note that this is true of certain sections of all $DISTRO users. It just so happens that *buntu seems to have collected a good majority of the lala singers in one place.
Defense of love of your distro is one thing, but not acknowledging the warts does not mean that they are not there. Granted the fingers in the ears and singing lalalalala does work as a distractor as the rest of us are either laughing or trying to speak louder to get through. Please note that this is true of certain sections of all $DISTRO users. It just so happens that *buntu seems to have collected a good majority of the lala singers in one place.
Quoting: It just so happens that *buntu seems to have collected a good majority of the lala singers in one place.
They probably use Macs, also.
Quoting:But how is that different from Slackware or Fedora?
I don't know. I haven't used either of them really. Are there live cds available for either of them. In the past I have tried fedora but I didn't like the package manager so I haven't really looked since. I haven't ever tried slackware.
> Are there live cds available for either of them.
I'm pretty sure there are live CD's for Fedora, though I've never checked them out.
The closest thing to a live CD for Slackware I know of would be Slax (http://www.slax.org/); though Wolvix, Zenwalk, NimbleX, and Vector Linux are all Slackware based, and I believe they all have live CD's.
I'm pretty sure there are live CD's for Fedora, though I've never checked them out.
The closest thing to a live CD for Slackware I know of would be Slax (http://www.slax.org/); though Wolvix, Zenwalk, NimbleX, and Vector Linux are all Slackware based, and I believe they all have live CD's.
Slackware has a lot of derivatives, but the real deal comes as a 3 CD installation set, no live CD. It's not something most users will like. I use it because you get a stable base, then you can download the packages you want, or it is really easy to build your own. The reason I use it is that you have that extremely stable base and can do whatever you want for apps. As noted above, I have the latest of everything on Slackware 12.1, released more than nine months ago, and have found no good reason to update to 12.2.
I'm not an expert on Fedora, but AFAICT they constantly update the apps. There are live CDs available. Fedora 10 works extremely well on my laptop. Package management appears to have been fixed.
I'm not an expert on Fedora, but AFAICT they constantly update the apps. There are live CDs available. Fedora 10 works extremely well on my laptop. Package management appears to have been fixed.
Quoting:KLIK isn't the answer...
But it does namek some sense to split e.g. Debian's main repository in e.g. "core", "desktop" and "server" ...
Actually that was what I was referring to, the KLIK approach is assuming your distro adheres to an old LSB / glibc providing core and then KLIK providing newer desktop applications running on that older core. The fact that KLIK is not distro-related is basically not important in the case I tried to make, KLIK is just one example of a system that splits the apps from the core. Probably there are more examples of this (Autopackage maybe? but KLIK is the first that came to mind. Another one would be BSD base + pkg's of some certain release and then on top of that using ports. The pkg's and base are usually stable and old while for ports you can always use the version of 'today'. Coming to think of it, MS Windows might serve as an example too.
The fact that developing such a thing can be rather hard is because a lot of developers don't know what the minimal version of core-system libraries for their app is because they always use rather new libraries. As a result a lot of the dependency - requirements when it comes to versions is guessing, at least as far as I have encountered. Finding the oldest glibc- and kernel version which for example Miro-2.0 works with can be quite hard however, and apart from that it's a lot of work because there are at least about 20 other dependencies too. Finding a solution is not easy I think, and even using a source-based distribution doesn't solve that I recently found out when trying to compile Miro for Gentoo (nonetheless, finally I did succeed!).
The last few days I have been thinking about release management and its problems (also with respect to the KDE4-thread), and until now my conclusion is the release engineers lack the mentality of 'providing the oldest version that 100% surely works'. Probably because in the majority of the cases a new version which doesn't 100% surely work solves issues the old version had, and because 'providing something that 100% surely works' normally increases time to market by several months.
I am downloading the fedora livecd now and will check it out.
Perhaps this summer when I have some extra time I will try out Slackware, since using a VM wont indicate if it will support my hardware very well.
Perhaps this summer when I have some extra time I will try out Slackware, since using a VM wont indicate if it will support my hardware very well.
I'd rather use Debian, but some of my hardware likes Ubuntu much better (and I have fewer problems).
Steven_ Why is that? Which Deb are you talking: Stable, Testing,
Freeking out of Controll?
Testing: I've had X issues on two machines (both Intel video hardware) with Lenny; screen artifacts that I can't seem to solve. No problems whatsoever in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
Steven_ Its that kernel version again, Its always the kernel.
I seem to have run into a problem with the Fedora live cd. My CD-ROM randomly forgets it has a disk in it so it won't boot from it. So I thought I would try to create a liveusb from the live cd and have run into a snag. The Ubuntu one does not work with a fedora iso and the fedora one works on windows and fedora.
Has anyone tried and succeeded in trying to make a fedora liveusb in a non fedora or windows environment?
Has anyone tried and succeeded in trying to make a fedora liveusb in a non fedora or windows environment?
> Has anyone tried and succeeded in trying to make a fedora liveusb in a non fedora or windows environment?
I've made a Fedora liveusb. I don't recall if I used the Fedora tool. I have done so for a number of distributions using unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
I've made a Fedora liveusb. I don't recall if I used the Fedora tool. I have done so for a number of distributions using unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Thanks bigg that appears to be working.
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You're using Ubuntu according to your post. I just saw something about Canonical's revenue hitting $30 million. All the testing and feedback and exposure seems to have paid off. Or do you mean you're happy if you don't have to pay out of your pocket? My time is valuable, so if someone wastes it I'm not grateful, even if they didn't charge me to waste my time.
> I want to have the core system to be separate from the apps.
What does that mean?