The last two releases of Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10) seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The biggest problem is hardware because if your hardware doesn’t work, you can’t test out the software, and the hardware bugs are the hardest to find because nearly every computer on the planet is different!

I agree and I have found bad bugs in both releases. In 9.04, my Intel video driver was slow and leaked memory like a sieve. In 9.10, that problem has been fixed, but now sound volume maxes out at 26%, my mouse doesn’t work when coming out of sleep, and when I open the laptop lid, the backlight doesn’t always come on. (The last two bugs appear to have been fixed post-ship.) Of course, I’ve found bugs in every release.

The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. And for every user that has problems, there are users who have a better situation with the latest release. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code. Ubuntu’s large user base means that it will find bugs not found by the upstream developers, which are mostly teams of just handfuls of people. And the bugs that Ubuntu users run into are nearly always bugs in the upstream code, so it isn’t entirely Ubuntu’s fault.

Solutions

Ubuntu has several choices. It can be conservative about what versions of software it runs, especially hardware-related components, so as to let the smaller distros find and fix the bugs. The downside of this is that Ubuntu is not carrying its own weight, and in general new software has new features that users want. What is the point of making a release every 6 months if it contains 6-month old software? A corollary of this is Mark Shuttleworth’s “cadence” suggestion: by having multiple distributions ship on the same day, they would presumably choose to use the same versions of software and share the load in finding bugs.

Some say that Ubuntu should ship less frequently, but a better solution is for Ubuntu to put more resources on the fundamentals. With every release, Ubuntu seems to have some shiny new trend it is talking about: cloud computing, new notifications, etc. and I worry they seem to become easily distracted and forget to keep fortifying their investments in the basics: Step 1 of Linux World Domination is World Installation.

Another reason that this problem is happening is that Ubuntu has chosen to be a separate team from Debian. Many of the bugs were found before the release of Ubuntu, but there just wasn’t enough people / time to track them down, and work with the upstreams to find a fix. And because Debian is a separate team, they are not engaged in this battle. (I have been complaining about the mistake of Ubuntu being a separate organization from Debian for 3.5 years so I won’t go into this any more.)

Linux is making good progress but has a ways to go still. Ubuntu currently has 74823 bugs. Focus on the bugs! You might not believe it, but at Microsoft we had it beaten into our heads to fix bugs: a bug meant an unhappy customer, and a bug that affected just 1% of users meant that there were millions of unhappy customers. Software that doesn’t work is not worth anything, and the bug list is the most important metric an organization could possibly be focused on. It is a problem that people in the Linux community talk much more about boot time than bug count.

Follow me @keithccurtis on Twitter.

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I take a risk by crossing the street.

In order to know the risks attached to Mono, you’d have to know what people inside MS think. Of course, since you’ve not chatted with any MS employees, you have no way of knowing the actual risk. Mono is not the same thing as TomTom. It would be nice if you acknowledged in the future that you don’t know whether MS views Mono as a friend or an enemy.

Your fear-mongering reminds me of the Bush administration 😉

You also don’t consider whether the patent issue can be easily worked around without throwing away all of Mono. Not all patent risks are the same. And do you actually know of any specific problems? Microsoft claims that there are hundreds of patent violations in Linux and so the safest thing is to run Windows. Is that what you will recommend next?

Apps like Gnote (which is a line for line port of TomBoy, missing many features of course, and it is easier to port than create anew) are created partially because of you. And Gnote is a total waste of time. You are also pushing people to stick with C and C++, and this is much worse for the free software community. If you had read my book, you would understand why we need to retire C and C++ as soon as possible.

And why not stand up against software patents? Let’s fight!

I sometimes feel that you should keep your opinions about free software focused only on the GPL and software license issues. Wading into programming languages and patent risks is much more complicated.

This is the talk I will give gave:

Hi;

I like Ubuntu very much, but I find it annoying how behind the curve you guys are with your releases. Jaunty is the first release of Ubuntu that has Mono debugging support out of the box. Jaunty will ship with Mono 2.0, which was released October 6, 2008, yet Mono 2.4 has just been released! I’m going to have to wait till October to get the Mono bits that were released in March.

Here is a list showing more examples of how Fedora is more up to date:
http://subbisays.blogspot.com/2009/03/ubuntu-904-vs-fedora-11-lot-can-change.html

In general, new software is better and more reliable than old software. You guys spend lots of time backporting fixes from newer builds that would be solved more efficiently by just taking newer builds! You guys also aren’t helping advance the state of the art by working on old software. Novell could care less about bugs in Mono 2.0.

If you guys ship every 6 months, using software that is 6 months old, did you really ship on day X, or 6 months ago and just sit on it?

I realize you guys have a tradeoff between stability and freshness, but I think your team is not making the right tradeoff, and I see this as a problem that crosses many teams. If there are any problems (that likely affect just a few customers), you can fix them right after release. What is the whole point of having this infrastructure of repos and backports?

-Keith