Ubuntu: Good and Bad. (Was: 13th December "Smack Down" Meeting)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 02:06:03PM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> I'd be interested in hearing some example of what you think is good, and
> what is bad, about the Ubuntu distribution.

Good: They do very much try to make a new installation pretty much just
work out of the box for many users, especially of laptops.

Bad: Good luck actually upgrading a working install to the next version
without something blowing up.  And updated frequently breaks things
rather badly due to lack of testing.  I remember a few years ago an Xorg
security update took out a huge number of intel video chips, which are
amazingly common among ubuntu users, but not very common among ubuntu
developers.

Having upgraded a Debian 2.1 install through every version so far without
any significant breakage ever happening, I expect upgrades to just work.
In debian they do.  In Ubuntu (and Fedora, and other fixed release date
distributions) they very frequently do not, since there just isn't time
to test properly and fix everything.  Meeting the release date is more
important to them, than releasing something that always (not just
usually) works.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists