4 ms·

> Day-to-day users don't want to be beta testers, they want a stable (i.e. bug-free and polished) experience, and Ubuntu doesn't deliver that. Use LTS if you w

by fafner 14y ago

> Day-to-day users don't want to be beta testers, they want a stable (i.e. bug-free and polished) experience, and Ubuntu doesn't deliver that. Use LTS if you want that. I don't think Pulseaudio or Unity is comparable to the Amazon-Lense. PA is mostly a technical decision. It caused some problems initially. But now it's fine and dislike of PA seems to be mostly a bandwagon thing. Unity was a drastic change and that certainly annoys users. But it's mostly about your design preference whether you like it or not. Although some (very loud) users seem to hate it with a passion. But the Amazon-Lense is on a different level because it is not on a technical or design level but rather on a philosophical or ideological level (I seem to lack a proper word here. But I hope you understand what I mean). And I agree with your criticism. Users dislike ads in a former ad-free space and users hate when people mingle with their privacy.

AnthonBerg 14y ago
"Use LTS" is fine in theory, but doesn't work in practice. The 2010 LTS has ceased to be useful (for me), and the 2012 LTS is buggy and unpolished. I see a false dichotomy - the normal releases could simply be more stable. Quite easily too, e.g. by not messing up the Debian way of doing things in many places.
acabal 14y ago
I often make this point and people often tell me "just use an LTS". But that's not my point; my point is, if I use an LTS, I can't (easily) get new versions of software I need. Upgrading one piece of software necessitates upgrading the entire system. Because of this, it's impossible to live in a stable and bug-free OS, because the core is always shifting underfoot. On a Windows system, does upgrading Photoshop also upgrade your network drivers? Of course not, but it does in Ubuntu (and most Linuxes). Shuttleworth's mistake is his intent on releasing alpha- and beta-quality software every 6 months, but without giving the community the easy and foolproof ability to pin certain software at certain versions, so they can get updates to some things but not others. That's why people got mad at Pulseaudio, at Unity, and (partly) at the half-baked Amazon stuff: because the very structure of Ubuntu and Linux forces these things on them, and they didn't have a choice if they also want the other shiny features of release X. Edit: Also, I was personally mad at Pulseaudio because when it was included in Ubuntu, it was so broken on my laptop that I literally had to hotkey `killall pulseaudio` to a keyboard shortcut. That's how bad it got, and it was like that for 2 releases!
- fafner 14y ago
  I agree that they should provide optionally new versions of LibreOffice, Gimp, and similar software for LTS releases. But I think it's highly unrealistic that this will include more than a few selected software packages. It takes probably quite some effort because Linux software is not only constantly changing but so are the dependencies. At some point it simply is not possible to use new software with an old plumbing. E.g. some package might depend on a newer version of gnome-libs which depend on a new version of something in the plumbing layer. As far as I see it the non-LTS releases are just the beta tests for the next LTS release. But somehow Canonical does not seem to fully agree with that. If I remember correctly the biggest issue with PA was that it was introduced in an LTS release. They should have probably waited one release and use the 4 releases to get it right. btw. PPAs and backports can help you if you want new versions in older releases.
  - takluyver 14y ago
    Actually, they're moving towards having many more applications updated and added for stable releases. Ubuntu's developer portal now has a system where developers can upload their own apps to the software centre, separately from the Ubuntu release cycle. It's still a work in progress, though - they've had some trouble scaling it up. Traditionally, distributions have been responsible for packaging 'upstream' software, which quickly becomes a bottleneck as more software is created. The key is getting developers to do the packaging themselves, aided by automated systems.
jlgreco 14y ago
I am not comfortable with the criticism of PA in the first place, since Fedora switched to it at about the same time but didn't botch it. In Ubuntu land PA apparently caused huge problems but I honestly did not even realize when the switch happened in Fedora.
- fafner 14y ago
  The only problem with PA I have are issues with the alsa-emulation layer. Except for that I seem to be lucky or issues were overstated (silent majority?). I remember that there was some criticism by Lennart Poettering that in some release Canonical did not ship an important bugfix for PA. But it could simply be the case that Fedora has less users and the users are more experienced. On the other hand a commonly heard criticism is that Canonical does not contribute enough to the plumbing layer.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I think one of the things that annoys me most about Ubuntu/Canonical is how it seemed they were trying to take credit for all the good things done by RH (improvements to NM most notably), but would fall back on "well those guys wrote this stuff" when things went wrong (criticism of Lennart, most notably).
    - fafner 14y ago
      Did the Canonical guys really criticise Lennart? That wouldn't be very nice of them.
meaty 14y ago
Sorry but LTS is not the solution. LTS is pretty much a frozen repository with the odd security patch thrown in. If any vendor packages are broken (i.e. mysql-server), they are pinned at the broken version. Any attempt to get these patched/fixed results in a closure on launchpad along the lines of "fuck off moron". You end up having to pull in backported packages from later releases resulting in dependency hell or compiling your own debs. The amount of times I've been fucked over by LTS releases due to these issues has put me right off. Not only that, we've even had LTS kernels that go bang on "supported and tested platforms". LTS stands for "Legendary Turd Stain" IMHO. You just don't get this with Debian - it just works.
- qznc 14y ago
  Your example "mysql-server" suggests you are talking about putting Ubuntu on a server. For desktop users who want Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, and MP3 support, Ubuntu is better at "it just works". I believe the biggest problem of LTS is that too few people use it. If most Ubuntu users would stay on LTS, then even upstream would take care to support it, which fixes the dependency hell problems.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Not at all. This is dev workstation stuff. I want Flash, mp3s and Java as well! I think the problem with LTS is mis-stated - Long Term Support is just a lie.
wyclif 14y ago
I came here to say "use LTS", but I do think it's more complicated than that. Isn't that what 10.04.x LTS releases are for? So far, I've had really great results by using 10.04.4 LTS and building the 3.6 kernel. It's going to be a sad day next April when it's end-of-lifed.

by fafner 14y ago

AnthonBerg 14y ago

"Use LTS" is fine in theory, but doesn't work in practice. The 2010 LTS has ceased to be useful (for me), and the 2012 LTS is buggy and unpolished. I see a false dichotomy - the normal releases could simply be more stable. Quite easily too, e.g. by not messing up the Debian way of doing things in many places.

acabal 14y ago

I often make this point and people often tell me "just use an LTS". But that's not my point; my point is, if I use an LTS, I can't (easily) get new versions of software I need. Upgrading one piece of software necessitates upgrading the entire system. Because of this, it's impossible to live in a stable and bug-free OS, because the core is always shifting underfoot. On a Windows system, does upgrading Photoshop also upgrade your network drivers? Of course not, but it does in Ubuntu (and most Linuxes). Shuttleworth's mistake is his intent on releasing alpha- and beta-quality software every 6 months, but without giving the community the easy and foolproof ability to pin certain software at certain versions, so they can get updates to some things but not others. That's why people got mad at Pulseaudio, at Unity, and (partly) at the half-baked Amazon stuff: because the very structure of Ubuntu and Linux forces these things on them, and they didn't have a choice if they also want the other shiny features of release X. Edit: Also, I was personally mad at Pulseaudio because when it was included in Ubuntu, it was so broken on my laptop that I literally had to hotkey `killall pulseaudio` to a keyboard shortcut. That's how bad it got, and it was like that for 2 releases!

fafner 14y ago
I agree that they should provide optionally new versions of LibreOffice, Gimp, and similar software for LTS releases. But I think it's highly unrealistic that this will include more than a few selected software packages. It takes probably quite some effort because Linux software is not only constantly changing but so are the dependencies. At some point it simply is not possible to use new software with an old plumbing. E.g. some package might depend on a newer version of gnome-libs which depend on a new version of something in the plumbing layer. As far as I see it the non-LTS releases are just the beta tests for the next LTS release. But somehow Canonical does not seem to fully agree with that. If I remember correctly the biggest issue with PA was that it was introduced in an LTS release. They should have probably waited one release and use the 4 releases to get it right. btw. PPAs and backports can help you if you want new versions in older releases.
- takluyver 14y ago
  Actually, they're moving towards having many more applications updated and added for stable releases. Ubuntu's developer portal now has a system where developers can upload their own apps to the software centre, separately from the Ubuntu release cycle. It's still a work in progress, though - they've had some trouble scaling it up. Traditionally, distributions have been responsible for packaging 'upstream' software, which quickly becomes a bottleneck as more software is created. The key is getting developers to do the packaging themselves, aided by automated systems.

jlgreco 14y ago

I am not comfortable with the criticism of PA in the first place, since Fedora switched to it at about the same time but didn't botch it. In Ubuntu land PA apparently caused huge problems but I honestly did not even realize when the switch happened in Fedora.

fafner 14y ago
The only problem with PA I have are issues with the alsa-emulation layer. Except for that I seem to be lucky or issues were overstated (silent majority?). I remember that there was some criticism by Lennart Poettering that in some release Canonical did not ship an important bugfix for PA. But it could simply be the case that Fedora has less users and the users are more experienced. On the other hand a commonly heard criticism is that Canonical does not contribute enough to the plumbing layer.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I think one of the things that annoys me most about Ubuntu/Canonical is how it seemed they were trying to take credit for all the good things done by RH (improvements to NM most notably), but would fall back on "well those guys wrote this stuff" when things went wrong (criticism of Lennart, most notably).
  - fafner 14y ago
    Did the Canonical guys really criticise Lennart? That wouldn't be very nice of them.

meaty 14y ago

Sorry but LTS is not the solution. LTS is pretty much a frozen repository with the odd security patch thrown in. If any vendor packages are broken (i.e. mysql-server), they are pinned at the broken version. Any attempt to get these patched/fixed results in a closure on launchpad along the lines of "fuck off moron". You end up having to pull in backported packages from later releases resulting in dependency hell or compiling your own debs. The amount of times I've been fucked over by LTS releases due to these issues has put me right off. Not only that, we've even had LTS kernels that go bang on "supported and tested platforms". LTS stands for "Legendary Turd Stain" IMHO. You just don't get this with Debian - it just works.

qznc 14y ago
Your example "mysql-server" suggests you are talking about putting Ubuntu on a server. For desktop users who want Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, and MP3 support, Ubuntu is better at "it just works". I believe the biggest problem of LTS is that too few people use it. If most Ubuntu users would stay on LTS, then even upstream would take care to support it, which fixes the dependency hell problems.
- meaty 14y ago
  Not at all. This is dev workstation stuff. I want Flash, mp3s and Java as well! I think the problem with LTS is mis-stated - Long Term Support is just a lie.

wyclif 14y ago

I came here to say "use LTS", but I do think it's more complicated than that. Isn't that what 10.04.x LTS releases are for? So far, I've had really great results by using 10.04.4 LTS and building the 3.6 kernel. It's going to be a sad day next April when it's end-of-lifed.