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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 8.10 broke Intel drivers, which are OSS. Furthermore Ubuntu ships with restricted drivers manager, which pragmatically installs properietary drivers where needed.

Software vendors have the resposibility to their users to perform regression tests as part of their product. If Ubuntu doesn't want do do that, or do it better, then they shouln't bother to compete with other OSs that do.

I'm saying this after 10+ years of use of Linux on my desktop. The 8.10 issue (after deliberately picking low-powered OSS-driven hardware) made me move to OS X, which I hate, in order to have a continuously working desktop.

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I have Ubuntu on my desktop and server, and OS X on my laptop. Personally I've experienced less problems with Ubuntu. I use proprietary 64bit ATI and my upgrade was smooth.

Considering I'd pay money for Ubuntu, I'm very happy to get it for free. If you're worried about stability, I suggest using the long term releases instead of upgrading to the cutting edge right away. If you want the cutting edge, wait a month before upgrading so the bugs can be worked out.

It's also important to remember that you are not a customer with a support contract with Canonical. You are a customer getting a great operating system for free. Something to factor into your calculations.

'If you're worried about stability, I suggest using the long term releases instead of upgrading to the cutting edge right away.'

The stable release didn't completely support using an external monitor on my video card. Seeing as I do presentations for a living, that's not so great.

'It's also important to remember that you are not a customer with a support contract with Canonical. You are a customer getting a great operating system for free. Something to factor into your calculations.'

From knowing a couple of people who work at Canonical, I honestly doubt Canonical support would consider lack of external monitor support a real bug.

I moved my home desktop back to Windows XP after Ubuntu 8.10 was released. It's the most stable desktop Operating System I know of. I never lost a file on it. I've never been unable to boot. I've never had hardware that wouldn't work on it. I have experienced quite a bit of Apple drama and figured it's just not worth the money. If I need to do any unixy stuff I have a button on my desktop that instantly launches an EC2 instance I can ssh into. Costs me about $1/month.

XP is great, until you try to do too much with it. Installing video codecs in beta or under development? I got system freezes galore. Didn't happen to me under OS X.

YMMV

You've never used it enough then :) all Operating systems have roughly equal "failure" rates in my experience (Fedora, W7 [this might change] and Server 2003 slightly lower / Ubuntu slightly higher than normal).

I work with a shed load of different operating systems working in a variety of capacities daily (though not so much in OSX). I haven't come across an operating system yet that recognises all hardware painlessly, doesn't come with a variety of random errors and doesn't ever crash :)

Have you tried other distros like Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora?

In the last 10 years? Red Hat since 5.0, Debian since either Slinky or Woody, SuSE since SuSE 5.0 or 6.

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