Ubuntu Is A Poor Standard Bearer For Linux
broadcast.oreilly.com
broadcast.oreilly.com
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I could go on, but how about some choice quotes? Keep in mind this is a fluff article that's only 7 paragraphs long, and sticks to the idiotic grade school "introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, concluding paragraph" nonsense formula, so it's more like 4 paragraphs long.
No wonder CrunchBang Linux is moving to a Debian as a base instead of Ubuntu. Linux Mint may be moving in the same direction.
Man, at this rate, Ubuntu might as well move to using Debian as a base, too.
It seems I haven't printed from the netbook, only the desktop running SalixOS, since I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). .... We can't have hardware magically stop working after a routine upgrade."
Yeah, they should put in a giant locked button and several warning signs that say you are about to replace almost every software component on your computer, with repeated warnings, explanations of what it means, and instructions. Well, I guess that's something you'd only do on a non-routine upgrade. Wait, oh.
The one conclusion I have reached is that Ubuntu is a very poor standard bearer for Linux. It isn't what I want Linux judged by. Other distributions have problematic releases but other major distributions do not have significant problems in nearly every release. Ubuntu does. So how do we, in the Linux press make people outside of the Linux community aware that Linux does not equate to Ubuntu? That is the real challenge we now face if we want Linux to be more widely accepted.
I had to stop to vomit between each sentence in the paragraph. It may be the most contrived thing I've ever read, and I've read Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction.
The best part about her article (3rd grade essay?) is the solution to her problem, which she did not include: unplug the printer and plug it back in.
> I had to stop to vomit between each sentence in the paragraph.
You may want to avoid the internet if even sort of silly articles like this make you throw up. You'll likely start losing weight in short order as you fail to keep any food down. That, or you could tone down the hyperbole and swearing some.
It is frustrating. I feel her pain, but dislike her way to handle it.
A friend of mine, observing my various struggles with ubuntu (I'm a n00b; he's been running linux since the dark ages, so he was my go-to guy- jedliu on here) was traumatized by my various problems. When he decided to move away from compiling his own updates (Gentoo), he opted for Arch Linux. Instead of having monolithic updates, Arch Linux just updates everything gradually, so you don't have the problems of updates breaking things that worked before as much.
First I upgraded my AirPort Express and I lost the ability to print via WiFi.
Then I upgraded to Leopard/i386 and making the printer work was akin to voodoo — I had to go through some tedious process of first installing the PPC drivers, setup the printer, and then overwrite the drivers with i386 versions. This got weirder and weirder, and eventually I gave the printer away and bought a Canon.
Edit: probably not appropriate, didn't want to make a big deal about it.
I've done stupid shit that I'm glad happened before search engines and Facebook.
My advisor for my M.Sc had a sex change, didn't stop her from being an excellent advisor.
So, not the greatest article, but does that mean break out the character assassination Google-fu?
Uh, I didn't say it was relevant either, dude. You're the one implying her history has a bearing on a shitty Linux critique.
I've done stupid shit that I'm glad happened before search engines and Facebook.
I once heard that search engines can let you search for things that existed before they were indexed, but that may just have been a rumor, or a tautology.
My advisor for my M.Sc had a sex change, didn't stop her from being an excellent advisor.
Apparently it didn't stop this person from being a shitty writer and an idiot.
So, not the greatest article, but does that mean break out the character assassination Google-fu?
I don't need Google to assassinate someone's character, I'm perfectly capable of doing that with some stupid crap they cough up onto the webbernets.
The machine is an entirely standard, off the shelf, Atom based PC. Taking the "Could I give this to a non-IT expert" test, it failed entirely. I'm not saying that this couldn't happen on a non-Linux system, but a) I've never had it happen to Mac or Windows b) Trawling support forums and kernel bug lists to discover the cause isn't good enough for end users and c) Waiting 4 months for a non-hacky fix sucks. As it stands, I could never seriously recommend Ubuntu to a non-tech savvy friend.
I suppose this is just anecdata, but I'm certainly not alone (another friend can tell you a similar story about sound cards, for example).
From the moment they released the first version of the kernel, it had broken error reporting (would just crash without reporting) and had bad lockup problems. This was reported early and ignored through the alpha, beta and release cycles. The obviously unreportable and undiagnosable lockup problem was "patched" by users (for the most part) by switching to the RT kernel.
Various serious problems were reported and closed out without being fixed and reopening them was not allowed, e.g. breaking Broadcom 43xx wireless cards.
The analysis at the time that made the most sense to me was that taking a Debian unstable snapshot every 6 months and then furiously trying to make it stable enough was impractical. My interpretation of the above development management problems was that shipping on schedule took absolute priority, and the whole process reached a tipping point with this release.
Me, I eventually went to Fedora, then to Debian stable lenny because I needed Xen and stability ... and by then the hardware I had bought for this was old enough that Debian lenny supported everything ^_^.
(I can supply plenty of URLs or my entire set of notes if desired.)
To what extent this is true is unknown as the author only gives anecdotes.
Please atleast install debugging symbols/packages and submit better bug reports. Ubuntu developers dont have access to _all_ varieties of hardware.
Yes, delays do happen - but help the developers in helping you.
Better stacktraces, log files, even debugging-enabled-but-slow-Ubuntu helps in fixing issues.
That's a lot of work for users who only see something no longer working after an upgrade. It's tolerable for people who expect to be doing QA in exchange for getting to use cutting edge releases, but if your users aren't programmers, which is the case with ubuntu, they'll just cuss and delete.
I do also think that you are likely correct in part on your 'too late' aregument, as the Linux community did miss a big opportunity while Vista was flopping... But just remember: there will be another Millennium Edition or Vista... Plus, there is always hope that innovation alone can serve as a big enough to draw for that next big Linux conversion-inspiring movement - think Beryl/Compiz as I do recall a huge surge of interest in Linux during its initial release into the wild!
- Cross-distro installation is only useful for closed source software.
- apt/yum/$DISTRO_SPECIFIC_PACKAGING_TOOL is the ultimate packaging tool, everything else is evil and can break the system.
- Different distros should be regarded as entirely different operating systems and hence shouldn't need to be compatible.
Until the community accepts the notion of a cross-distro installation system, things look very bleak indeed.
Can you comment on what advantages does autopackage have over other package managers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but all package managers are essentially cross distro - I can run rpm/yum on my Ubuntu machine.
And a google search turns up .... umm.. this - http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/autopackage_designed_by_...
Case in point: I recently bought an EeePC 1005PE and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. This is probably the most popular netbook sold today, but networking and power management were completely borked under a fresh install. Figuring out what was wrong and fixing it was a distinctly non-trivial process that took hours and a couple of reinstalls. Even then, battery life under Ubuntu is drastically worse than the same hardware running Windows 7.
"We FOSS supporters get all on our high horses about proprietary software while we keep offering up "Linux for humans" that, in reality, is an oft broken mess, at least in the case of Ubuntu. I am back to believing Andrew Wyatt was right when he called the distro "garbage salad." This is a perfect example of what he was describing. No wonder CrunchBang Linux is moving to a Debian as a base instead of Ubuntu. Linux Mint may be moving in the same direction."
A specific complaint I could find from the author is about a printer driver. While I haven't used another distro for quite some years now besides Ubuntu and RHEL, third-party drivers often fail to work on every platform - Mac and Windows included.
While the user does represent a common user, and usability and reliability could be improved in Ubuntu - I find the article a bit too "garbage-salad" (to quote the author).
RHEL backports a lot of driver updates to its stable releases. Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem to do this.
The only way to make it work on OSX is to install ghostscript and hpijs and then dive into cups internals. On Ubuntu, it works out of the box.
AFAIK, Mac OS X and Linux share a lot here. Both use (Apple-owned, and GPL/LGPL) CUPS.
I agree, they do have "pretty good" third party driver support. But a non-intel mac from 4 years ago will not likely run a new printer, nor would an intel mac likely have a driver for printer 5 years old. A huge effort has been made for backwards compatibility, and driver support from commercial products, and that doesn't make driver support or bug-fix responsiveness inherently better.
The author could have not upgraded the OS and her printer would still work fine. I don't like that solution - but the Ubuntu bashing in the article seems contrived. Maybe Ubuntu LTS can be improved. But I don't see the article expressing this concern adequately .
Ditto for scanning. I can't find good scanning software for OS X that doesn't suck or costs a lot of money. (Image Capture is too primitive, I want something like XSane) So I boot Linux every time I want to scan something.
- Backports: No Thunderbird 3.0 on Karmic 64-Bit ("we'll get it in the next release"). Good luck with the daily builds.
- Bugfixes: Yesterday, I got locked out of my account after enabling auto-login with an encrypted home-directory. I consider this a showstopper for end users. The bug was fixed after twelve months, and only for Lucid.
I wonder if the author tested every single other Linux OS with the same printer!
Instead of complaining regarding a free product I prefer if they submitted a bug report to ensure a better experience for everyone else and avoid this situation from happening again.
That does not mean it will not get fixed in the future, I'm fairly certain with the high exposure of this article will get it done more rapidly.
Once fixed can the author come up with something else that supports their argument?
That said, I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS for about 2 years and I've never had any real problems (that I didn't cause myself...) with it, so I don't quite agree with the author.
If she really wants to support oss, perhaps she could pay a developer to fix the bug?
Also, a new printer probably costs less than the dev time to fix the bug, and less than her time for writing the rant is worth.
Edit: i've also had an old scanner stop working. Os x doesn't support it anymore either. Inconvenient, but it is old, after al. No biggie.
So that might explain the biased flamebait.
I'm constantly bombarded with things working in a previous release no longer working in a new release. This involves everything from video-drivers, GDM, wifi, powermanagement etc etc ad infinitum.
And yes. Constantly breaking things which used to work is not what I call progress. See fewt's take on this for a more technical breakdown on how Ubuntu's internal workings can be (1).
It's become so extremely annoying that for me, that right now the only thing I'm using Ubuntu for are shell-VMs with a fairly predictable "hardware" config and for my netbook for lack of better choice.
Or maybe printers are all cheap pieces of garbage, somehow worth less than the toner inside of them, so full into the idea of planned obsolescence you just buy a new one when it's time to replace the ink..