Comments on: Linux’s Growing Pains

By: Tweets that mention Linux’s Growing Pains « keithcu.com -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Linux’s Growing Pains « keithcu.com -- Topsy.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:15:07 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marius Adrian, Keith Curtis. Keith Curtis said: Linux's growing pains: http://bit.ly/34othS [...]

By: Larry

Larry — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:59:39 +0000

OpenBSD has a six-month release schedule, and its user base is probably even smaller than Slackware. OpenBSD is renown for its stability, lack of bugs, *very* good documentation, and generally good coding standards. Ubuntu is subpar in all these areas, IMO. It is rubbish to say that you can’t fix the bugs “until users are running the code”.

For the record, I am still running Ubuntu 8.04 in our local library, and I don’t dare upgrade until the next LTS version has been out for a while and tested in userland. I am pretty disgusted by the quality of Ubuntu releases compared to Slackware and OpenBSD, and am looking to abandon Ubuntu for another FLOSS operating system ASAP.

By: KeithCu

KeithCu — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:53:09 +0000

The Intel driver memory leak was in released code not written by Ubuntu. Nearly every bug exists in code not written by Ubuntu.

By: Mat

Mat — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:48:48 +0000

I think it is pretty cocky to release OS every 6 months. Even the Mines game is bugged. What the? Just fix those 70,000 bugs!

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:13:11 +0000

This should be retitled “Ubuntu’s Growing Pains”. The issues described have nothing to do with Linux per se.

By: Oktay Yahyavi

Oktay Yahyavi — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:34:45 +0000

I had Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop, It worked nice. Some days ago I decided to upgrade to 9.10. I found really bad bugs, specially about hardware, so I decided to migrate to Mandriva 2010 and I am really happy with it!

By: oiaohm

oiaohm — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:07:43 +0000

Some of Ubuntu issue is pushing out particular techs before they are ready. Pulseaudio has a lot of bugs known even before Ubuntu decide to make it main.

Stability vs Features. If Ubuntu was prepared to give up some features in the short term its over all stablity could be increases massively.

Ie remove Pulseaudio. Remove/disable compiz and related on all bar DRI2 supporting cards.

All the features could be returned in future. When they are truly ready for mass testing.

By: Richo

Richo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:21:18 +0000

I think there is a degree of overstatement of the problem going on here. Sure there are annoying bugs in recent Ubuntu releases but when you compare a Ubuntu system now with that of even 3 years ago the contrast is strong. The bugs then were in my experience more profound because the open source stack was less mature then. I currently run 5 Ubuntu boxes of quite varying hardware and in the last 3 releases I have had a few niggling bugs that took a few days to sort out but compared to the situation 3 years ago things are fairly humming along.

Proof of my assertion I believe is the ever expanding (and bitching) userbase.

By: KeithCu

KeithCu — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:08:06 +0000

It isn’t a matter of testing; there are too many machines. If any distro had 20 million users, it would have the same problem.

And Ubuntu can’t switch libs: the bugs are in the kernel, X, etc.

By: Anne Brach

Anne Brach — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:04:09 +0000

“Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found”
I couldn’t agree more.

“.. and they cannot be found until users are running the code.”
I call rubbish. Most of the bugs would be found if the releases were tested properly. Part of the problem is that the releases are rushed out the door without proper testing. Some of the bugs I have found can’t possibly be missed if the release were tested properly. I feel that too many bugs should prompt the dev team to switch libs or write their own, the end user would have a much more enjoyable experience.

I wonder how much of the recent uproar would have been non-existent had the release been properly tested. As long as bugs are acceptable, we will always have bugs.

By: KeithCu

KeithCu — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:48:09 +0000

The point is: how do you know? None of the bugs I’m talking about exist in “Ubuntu’s code”. The bugs exist in the upstreams. Ubuntu is basically snapshotting the free software stack and the hardware bugs show up only on specific machines. With Slackware’s tiny userbase there are likely lots of bugs that they don’t even know about. If you don’t have users, you don’t have bugs.

By: definitely not tony

definitely not tony — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:34:13 +0000

Agreed- current Ubuntu has some major flaws that aren’t evident in, for example, the current release of Slackware(sure, I’m biased, but still, I’m right).