Is Ubuntu Heading Down...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| ColonelPanik Feb 10, 2009 3:58 PM EDT |
Ubuntu works for me, but I have no tech skills so what do I know. Every new release of Ubuntu did more better. Hardware detection was better, more drivers, easier install. Guess I am just easy! |
| tracyanne Feb 10, 2009 4:18 PM EDT |
And yet we see people complaining that what worked on the previous release of Ubuntu doesn't work on the next release. |
| bigg Feb 10, 2009 4:31 PM EDT |
Surprisingly, the only recent release that isn't giving me trouble is Jaunty. So far, it runs everything I need for day-to-day work on my newest laptop without any trouble. The same cannot be said for 8.04 or 8.10. There's nothing better when it works. |
| bhuot Feb 10, 2009 4:59 PM EDT |
I have had great success with Ubuntu for several years, but after being bitten by 2 major bugs - one relating to USB drives getting hosed and the other screwing up X-windows which were later acknowledged by the community to be problems many people had, I use the final release and do no updates until the next release comes out. I think for a lot of people the applications are available and good enough, but trying to release a whole new system every 6 months is not enough time to work out bugs. And there should never be any kernel updates until the next release cycle. But this is not unique to Ubuntu. What I would like to see is the latest versions of the applications, but I don't want the latest version of Gnome, X-Windows, Kernel, associated libraries and so on. |
| ColonelPanik Feb 10, 2009 5:01 PM EDT |
TA: Is that an Ubuntu problem or does it have to do with the kernel? |
| tracyanne Feb 10, 2009 5:09 PM EDT |
I don't Know CP, I think it's related to Broadcom cards, which, as I understand what JohnSA was saying, set up easily on Gutsy (I think) but broke when he installed Heron. According to Ken (Helios) this isn't a problem with the same kernel on Ubuntu Ultimate and Mint. I know that Cannonical do some really strange and hacky things with Ubuntu, according Loye at IYCC it's taken them (IYCC) sometime to untangle those strange things for their Segueno distro (if you're listening Loye, I hope I'm not betraying a confidence). |
| herzeleid Feb 10, 2009 5:11 PM EDT |
If you want stable, run LTS. If you don't use LTS, don't complain that it's not stable. |
| number6x Feb 10, 2009 5:54 PM EDT |
I tried ubuntu early on and saw no reason to use it instead of debian. I had few complaints. I had a few "why did they do that different?" comments (changes that made no sense to me but maybe made sense to canonical people). All distros have benefits and shorcomings. Ubuntu was just another. I got a laptop with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed 1 year ago and have been happily using it ever since. It is running 8.0.4 LTS right now. I don't know if I'll upgrade. All my hardware is supported. The LTS release gets regular updates. Its not a bad distro. I think slack and debian are better, but Ubuntu works on this machine so I have no reason to change it. (History: I started with slack in 1997 I was using Suse from 1998 through 2004 have been using slack and debian since 2005 added the ubuntu laptop in 2008) |
| hkwint Feb 10, 2009 6:03 PM EDT |
It might not be related, but I know Debian has had some serious release management problems (If all goes as planned this topic will be covered in my FOSDEM article of the second day). Which they are working on at this moment. I can understand if Debian has some problems with rel-mgmt and Ubuntu is Debian based, it will certainly reflect on the quality of Ubuntu as well, even if they do their own bug-squashing. Still, I have found no good answer to the question why someone does releases at all. Read "The megafreeze model is broken" at http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2007/03/03/T19_15_26/ to see developer-arguments why the Debian-release model is broken. On the other hand, alternatives all come with their own problems of course. However the Debian / Ubuntu model concentrates works and problems in a few weeks why the Gentoo scheme for example divides your problems more evenly over time. I prefer the latter method, and I don't understand why system / network administrators would like two 168-hr workweeks in a year while the other 50 weeks doing almost nothing, but probably this is just beyond me. |
| bhuot Feb 10, 2009 10:06 PM EDT |
I'm not complaining about anything - I am just explaining my experiences. I am grateful for anything provided for free. This is a forum where people were talking about ways to improve Linux and that why I said it. The problem with LTS is you don't get updates to user level apps - like OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Gimp, and the like. I want to have the core system to be separate from the apps. That is one of the reasons why I use OS X more often than Linux. |
| hkwint Feb 11, 2009 5:52 AM EDT |
Quoting:I want to have the core system to be separate from the apps. A lot of users seem to be asking this. There are technologies available in the Linux ecosystem to do this - like KLIK for example - but sadly these are not very frequently used and I believe the developers suffer from a lack of time / other developers to do all these efforts. Something I'd like to ask: If you have LTS, does that mean you can't install the newest OOo, Gimp, Inkscape etc? |
| Sander_Marechal Feb 11, 2009 6:43 AM EDT |
KLIK isn't the answer because most people still prefer to get the software from their distribution repository and integrated with all their tools, package managers and what not. But it does namek some sense to split e.g. Debian's main repository in e.g. "core", "desktop" and "server" with slightly different policies applying to each. |
| bigg Feb 11, 2009 7:16 AM EDT |
> I am grateful for anything provided for free. 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? |
| maxxedout Feb 11, 2009 9:17 AM EDT |
>> 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. |
| bigg Feb 11, 2009 9:47 AM EDT |
> 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. |
| theboomboomcars Feb 11, 2009 10:08 AM EDT |
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. |
| bigg Feb 11, 2009 10:18 AM EDT |
> 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? |
| rijelkentaurus Feb 11, 2009 10:47 AM EDT |
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. |
| azerthoth Feb 11, 2009 11:25 AM EDT |
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. |
| rijelkentaurus Feb 11, 2009 11:33 AM EDT |
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. |
| theboomboomcars Feb 11, 2009 12:52 PM EDT |
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. |
| jdixon Feb 11, 2009 1:10 PM EDT |
> 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. |
| bigg Feb 11, 2009 1:14 PM EDT |
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. |
| hkwint Feb 11, 2009 1:22 PM EDT |
Quoting:KLIK isn't the answer... 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. |
| theboomboomcars Feb 11, 2009 1:59 PM EDT |
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. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 11, 2009 8:38 PM EDT |
I'd rather use Debian, but some of my hardware likes Ubuntu much better (and I have fewer problems). |
| ColonelPanik Feb 11, 2009 8:45 PM EDT |
Steven_ Why is that? Which Deb are you talking: Stable, Testing,
Freeking out of Controll? |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 11, 2009 11:35 PM EDT |
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. |
| ColonelPanik Feb 12, 2009 11:57 AM EDT |
Steven_ Its that kernel version again, Its always the kernel. |
| theboomboomcars Feb 12, 2009 1:43 PM EDT |
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? |
| bigg Feb 12, 2009 2:01 PM EDT |
> 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/ |
| theboomboomcars Feb 12, 2009 2:46 PM EDT |
Thanks bigg that appears to be working. |
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