back to Ubuntu 8.04

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Michael Hipp <Michael at hipp.com> wrote:
> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>>
>> In my experience, Ubuntu's focus has
>> never been quality.  They push out the shiniest object possible, in an
>> effort to attract Windows users, and if they happen to get some
>> quality from upstream Debian, so be it.
>
> I doubt there's any real data to establish this (remembering that the plural
> of anecdote is not data). In my experience I install it, run it, and it
> works. It doesn't particularly have any more or less issues than any other
> distro I've ever tried.

I have lots of data.  At $DAYJOB, I install Ubuntu via kickstart
_hundreds_ of times every month, and then run stress tests.  I do the
same with OpenSUSE, Fedora & RHEL.  Ubuntu, by far, fails in the
following areas more frequently than the others (often by an order of
magnitude):
0) kickstart support 100% broken in 8.10.  Bug filed over 2 months
ago, and remains unfixed to this day.  All requests for a rough
estimate on when it might be fixed have been completely ignored (and
I'm not the only person complaining in that Launchpad bug).  Best as
we can guess is that there is no intent to fix it for 8.10, and it
might be fixed for 9.04.
1) Installer failures.  At random, the OS installer fails to find its
own packages, and just crashes/dies.  It somehow manages to munge the
MBR before this, rendering the system unbootable without manual
intervention.  None of this behavior has ever happened with SUSE or
Redhat products.
2) kernel panics/Oops.  As I mentioned above, I run the same exact
stress tests on all the distros, using the same exact hardware.
Ubuntu manages to experience kernel panics/Oops much more often than
the others.  And there's rarely any clear pattern.  I've seen them all
over the place, from filesystems, to device drivers, to memory mgmt to
IO schedulers.  SuSE & Fedora come in second, with RHEL a very very
distant third (as in just about never).
3) random package bugs.  The gcc shipping in 8.10 has a severe flaw,
against which a Launchpad bug has been opened since well before 8.10
was released, and remains unfixed to this day.  Fedora10 &
OpenSUSE-11.1 both ship the same 'version' of gcc, yet both of them
managed to patch their gcc packages prior to release to fix this flaw.
 Ubuntu just shipped the brokeness and has ignored numerous complaints
about it.  There have been many other buggy packages, but this gcc
issue is yet the latest.

So contrary to popular opinion, I'm not just making this stuff up
based on an irrational hatred of Ubuntu.  Their quality is absolutely
atrocious and should be an embarrassment, yet Mark Shuttlesworth
doesn't seem to care, because his well stated opinion is that their
competition is Windows, and we all know how the quality is in that
camp.

>
> I've filed some bug reports. Many have been fixed. Sometimes things don't
> work nearly as well as I expect. Other things work much better than I
> expect.
>
> In other words, it's a Linux distro.
>
> If some newbie (or intermediate, or advanced) Linux user came to me and
> asked for a distro recommendation I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Ubuntu.
> Likely they'll be happy, if their needs can at all be met by Linux.

That's unfortunate.


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org