Norsefire writes to mention a Register piece reporting that early adopters are having a tough time with Karmic Koala, Ubuntu's latest release. "Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums." What has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?
*sigh* We see these kinds of articles on every major new release of Ubuntu/Fedora/Windows/OSX. This is NOT news. When you're swapping out major parts of your OS and applications, things are bound to break. I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy or anything, but this kind of stuff gets on my nerves. To everyone who claims they were "stung" by this update, I have two questions:
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
Blank and flickering screens: No Failure to recognize hard drives: No Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: No Failure to get encryption running: Sorta, but only because my computer took a dive in the middle of the live upgrade. I had to remount / read-write from an emergency console and run apt-get again. Or actually it told me to run "dpkg --configure -a" to correct it. That installed most things, but I had to reboot into the normal recovery console and run last updates. Rebooted and...
Working flawlessly with full disk encryption and everything. No problems with anything so far, that's my anecdotal evidence at least.
That's what you call working flawlessly? When it kicks you into an emergency console in which you had to remount your hard disks manually in read-write mode and run the package reconfigure command?
Clearly 2009 is not yet the year of Linux on the desktop.
From that point on, yes - everything works and everything boots normally now. It didn't handle an unexpected reboot in the middle of the upgrade gracefully, but I don't know any consumer OS that reliably does.
I've had a fairly painless upgrade from Jaunty on two laptops and a desktop. What is weird for me is how it interacted with VirtualBox; after the upgrade, my username was missing from the vboxusers group and my XP VMs no longer saw the USB hub; easy to fix once I figured it out, but really frustrating.
My primary desktop at home, a 2nd desktop at work, and before release, I had the beta and then RC running in VM's for a few weeks. None of these had problems. Then again most of this is on older hardware (p4's with similar era video cards, etc).
I was looking to replace the default 8.04 in my dell mini 9 with the 9.10 netbook remix. I found out that the desktop-switcher is not included in the distro. So I need to stick with the default single windows window manager, instead of the full GNOME. Why you may ask? Well, the desktop-switcher application was too buggy on release time, and they decided to remove it from the distro instead of fixing it. So nobody can complain and more important, there is nothing to be fixed if it's not there in first place. I'll stick to the old but reliable 8.04, for the time being.
I upgraded my wife's system - which is on a Japanese laptop and everything seems to have gone fairly smoothly. I was concerned when it asked me for the keyboard settings, but it seems to have respected my original settings nonetheless. Boot times seem a bit nicer and she hasn't complained of any stability issues.
It's definitely gone a lot smoother than past upgrades which were extremely unstable on her system, X often crashing, windows becoming unresponsive, or the arty completely bombing out for no reason.
In fairness, it does sound like the failure of a single individual to get their home folder encryption running was picked up by El Reg and blown up out of all proportion [dustinkirkland.com].
Flickering screens? Yes, I saw that, but it was fixed by a fresh install rather than an upgrade.
There are some niggling bugs and lack of polish, but this isn't anything like Canonical Vista, despite what some people are hyping.
It's also important to note the difference between LTS and 10 release. If you want stable you stick with LTS. This has been the case for at least as long as I've been an Ubuntu user. The thing that pisses me off to no end is that pain you have to go through to get a xen kernel on Ubuntu which makes it a pain in the ass to install in VM on XenServer. Ended up creating PV VM, using a Debian kernel, and then creating a VM template. So when I create a new VM I resize the disk to be what I need. Of course there are other errors, tcpdump and dhclient on my Ubuntu server installs seems to error on bootup with Debian but fortunately for me, it's a server so I just removed dhclient. Probably just going to remove AppArmor too since that seems to be causing the tcpdump error. A lot of effort just for a PV setup when it all works by default with Windows. Of course SUSE, Fedora, CentOS all work fine with their regular installers.
As long as we're trading unsubstantiated anecdotes, let me say that my experience with Karmic Koala has been perfectly smooth. I have it running natively on one machine and inside a VirtualBox VM on another, and in both instances both the install process and the system as a whole have worked very satisfyingly.
Canonical has made no secret of the fact that deadlines are more important to them than milestones. They shoot (ostensibly) for "usability", not stability.
It runs better than 9.04 on this machine that I am using. This is a K6-3D/400 with 256M and 10G drive. It was upgraded from 7.04 - 16 hours per release.
Issues since 9.10...
Failure during boot get Xwindows/gnome to start. On new log on screen is now a choice of gnome and safe gnome. Just change to the other one and boots OK.
During first boot Netscape kept kicking errors about xorg. Those when a way on second full boot.
Do not like new update apt just showing up with a click. Liked better the icon in tool bar.
I needed to make room to upgrade, because the 4 Gb SSD in the EEE was close to full. I have my/home partition on the 12 Gb SSD, so I needed to clean out things like the apt cache. Eventually, I had to remove some bigger packages like Picasa (with Wine) and Open Office to free up enough space on/.
With 50 Mb more than it claims it wanted, it finally started.
Halfway thru the upgrade, it froze and I had to reboot. Packages had been downloaded, but not all installed.
I had to reboot using a rescue USB stick and chroot over to the main disk. I tried an apt-get dist-upgrade and it said the system was hosed, and suggested a dpkg -a something rescue command. I did that and it finished processing the files it had. I then rebooted into "recovery mode" on that version, and did the dist-upgrade again and it finished. Another reboot and it was successfully in a normal login.
I logged in and immediately did and apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get autoremove to get the half-dozen updates and clean things up. I then added back in Open Office and a few other missing packages that I cleaned out to make space.
The only thing I can say is in the end, it worked. I've had upgrade horrors like this before with Slackware -- which I have *NEVER* successfully upgraded. They *ALL* had to be re-installs, which is one of the big reasons why I no longer use Slackware. In the past, upgrades have gone smoothly with (K)Ubuntu, as well as my CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat systems. This one was one of the worst.
It is nice, one running. Very slick, and I am mostly quite happy with the way it operates. The only bug I've bumped into that is new is if I'm running on battery, and the battery gets low enough for the system to issue a warning, kicker dies. No, I haven't reported it, yet. Probably later tonight I'll see if I can get a backtrace and send it over.
My experience would have really stumped a Linux noob. There needs to be a bit more Q&A. I got the feeling there was a bit of "let's push out on the Windows 7 day, no matter what" going on.
The upgrade was a bit rough - the GUI system update tools are very prone to breaking, often freezing to the point that only a forcequit can put things back to normal (I almost always use the command line because of that). Unfortunately the only way I knew of to update to 9.10 was using a GUI tool, which naturally broke, forcing me to restart the upgrade (although it was called a "partial upgrade". As for the finished product, booting time is abysmal, pushing past 100 sec. and the wireless doesn't work without a driver (it worked flawlessly in 9.04), and even with the driver whenever I move around any new wireless networks I come across aren't recognized - I need to suspend/unsuspend to restart the wireless system and get the new access points recognized. And the monitor randomly shuts off once in a while. And the mouse (trackpad) moves erratically sometimes.
Either I should switch to some other distro or I need better hardware.
All 3 to Karmic. All 3 work great. None are even remotely similar hardware wise. As an added bonus the power saving on my laptop works better than my wife's Vista machine now which is definitely a great upgrade.
I've been using it since the morning it came out (before it showed up on the home page, but was on the mirrors).
I haven't had any show stopping problems. I've found it to be waaay better than 9.04. The sound works far better (it used to not work for some apps), as does compiz.
Oddly, the only thing that didn't work about Ubuntu One. It complained that I had a version too new for the servers. *shrug*
Unlike previous releases where I jumped in fairly early in the beta process (beta 2 or 3), I waited to move to Karmic until the release. I also decided to do a clean install this time to ensure I wouldn't run into any upgrade issues.
Unfortunately, despite the supposed "papercut" fixes, this release seems far more prone to problems. On my Dell Latitude 620 (with Intel graphics, mind you):
Where Jaunty did great handling my laptop display and external monitor, Karmic has had no end of problems; problems that kept enforcing mirroring of displays, continually defaulting to 1024x768, random placements of the taskbar and notification popups, etc. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8229025 [ubuntuforums.org] about moving the taskbar.
The system defaulted to enabling compiz. I turned it off while troubleshooting all of the other video errors, but now it won't enable again.
Despite the touted KMS, I still have a 2-3 second wait at boot (text mode from Grub I'm assuming), and later a 2-3 second delay with a blank screen excepting an underscore in the top-left corner that shows up between the boot image (eg, usplash) and the "pulsing" gdm startup
The overall boot time (from power on to entering my password) is roughly identical to Jaunty -- I don't notice any difference.
Power usage seems to be about the same, although powertop has reported a spike of 33W whereas before I never saw it go over 19W.
Much higher memory usage reported in system monitor (previously most of the memory was allocated to cache, now most of it is allocated to programs).
About the only good thing I can say (which may also be attributed to the larger 500G drive I swapped in for the install), is that overall the system seems smoother and more responsive.
As this article attacked the feature I personally worked on in Karmic, I felt it appropriate to respond in my blog at http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/11/register-bloodied-by-lack-of-research.html [dustinkirkland.com].
Typically, I read and respect The Register. They usually run intriguing technology articles that make me think. I'm quite disappointed with today's carelessly researched piece, specifically, the paragraphs regarding eCryptfs.
Lack of automation? In Ubuntu 9.10, encrypting your home directory is a matter of selecting a check box in the installer: That's it. 9.04 Encrypted Home upgrading users simply run update-manager and upgrade all packages to 9.10. Their home directory encryption is not affected by this.
The author of this article found one post in the Ubuntu Forums poorly articulating an issue with home directory encryption and suddenly Ubuntu 9.10 users are getting "bloodied" by encryption in Ubuntu? Seriously?
I expect better journalism from The Register...
:-Dustin
I've been using Linux for 11 years. Before Linux captured 10+% of the desktop market share (according to Ballmer himself!) most of the community was technically oriented and ranting wasn't that common. We understood that those doing the developing were VOLUNTEERS and the best way to help them was to post BUG reports filled with details of the bug that the developer could use to resolve the bug and fix it. IOW, the users were the testers. We understood that and agreed to it. We were patient and our patience was rewarded.
Now, we have a generation of users who don't appreciate or care that most of the developers are still volunteers. These users don't care that they get the OS, the desktop and tens of thousands of high quality apps for free. Even worse, they don't want to take the time to take notes of the problem they think they are having and file factual bug reports at application's bugzilla site. What they will take time to do is write rants in blogs and news groups. Rants that are devoid of facts or knowledge but long on flames and vituperations. Thankfully, most developers know about these kinds of "Penguins" and ignore them. What else can they do? The rants rarely contain useful information and the developer doesn't have the time to search the countless blogs and forums for rants about his software. If he did he wouldn't get any developing done and he'd get discouraged and quit, which would make Microsoft happy,
To make matters worse, many ranters are serial ranters. They aren't satisfied with ranting in a single forum or blog. They visit as many as the can and post essentially the same rant in all of them. This makes the ranter appear to be part of a larger movement when, in fact, he is not. There were several ranters in the KDE4 dustup that were identified as serial ranters, and for a year and a half you could track them through the Linux sites as they dropped one rant after another. If someone called them on the topic of a rant they'd switch topics in their next rant. It didn't matter. The purpose was to destroy KDE4, if possible, and force developers back to KDE 3.5.x. The ranters were totally ignorant of the technical issues and reasons why KDE was redesigned from the bottom up.
The examples of stupid rants are almost endless. One ranter registered on a forum just to make his first post a rant against KDE 4.2.1 because "IT didn't have a way to change the menu structure to KDE 3.5.10's." Read the documentation? NO! It takes too much time and he's much too important to do such trival stuff. Ask a question on the forum instead of ranting for his first post? NO! He's not about to humiliate himself by asking a newbie question.
So, he rants. The first reply states "right click on the K-Gear menu icon and select "Convert to classic menu".
Now, everybody knows that not only is he a mindless ranter, he is also an idiot.
The problem is that his subject line appears in some Google search of "Problems with Ubuntu" and adds at least one count, or more if the rant is picked up by multiple blogs, to the number of users supposedly having trouble with Kubuntu (or Ubuntu). Someone takes the results of that search and extrapolates it into a story about how "Some Early Adopters Stung By Kbuntu's Karmic Koala".
Meanwhile, my Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 instalation on my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H notebook with an Intel GM45 video chip continues to hum like the perfect combination that it is. Did I say that I checked the compatibility of my notebook with Linux before I installed Linux on it?
Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism...
I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and it is quite buggy. Much more than previous releases. I have had to go back to the NDIS wrapper to use my WG511 PCMCIA wifi adapter. I haven't had to do that in years.
And then I thought Ubuntu was too slow, so I switched to Arch (rolling release) and it's more stable. That may seem strange to you, but only if you don't know how Ubuntu/Debian defines "stable". Stable on Debian and Ubuntu means old. If it was release a year ago, it's stable. Who cares if sound doesn't work on your computer, at least it's stable! Who cares if pidgin-facebookchat crashes every couple minutes, in Debian-land it's stable (this is a particularly interesting case because pidgin-facebookchat was added right after the project started, and then Ubuntu arbitrarily stopped adding new versions to the repos even though the plugin still isn't done, so every release adds to the stability). Mozilla release are remarkably stable and always contain security updates.. but sorry, Firefox 3.5 wasn't old enough until this release. Every version of the nvidia drivers add more stability, but I think we'll stick with the old versions.. you know.. because they're old.
And that's not to say that sticking with old versions is always bad, it's just that the method of deciding what's stable is literally "is it old?". Why not test things and then update, instead of arbitrarily picking a version and declaring it to be stable? Or keep track of projects that release safe code and give them 2 weeks to make sure there's no horrible bugs, and then update (like what exactly is the reason for holding back Firefox and Pidgin?).
How much did those users pay for their copy of Karmic?
Yes, it does make a difference. If I pay for a finished product, I expect it to be finished. If someone hands me a CD and says try this, I will try it, but not get upset if it doesn't work out perfectly.
In this society that we call open source, we fully understand that Canonical doesn't have the resources to run large test labs. We also know that we get the product for free, and can ban together with a large cadre of like-minded folks to fix problems that we do find. Most Ubuntu releases are initially full of problems. They tend to dissipate much quicker than your first Service Pack that you'll get from the behemoth that HAS charged you enough to do some proper engineering and testing.
Right. That's why I'm still running XP on the Windows side of the box and have no plans whatsoever -- nor really any motivation -- to upgrade to Windows 7. And the next box will likely be running XP under virtualization. Odds are that it will be quite some time before there is any significant Windows software that won't run under XP.
You can bandy the word "professionalism" around with all of its varied meanings and hope that no one here is literate enough to call you on it -- this is Slashdot, after all -- but the fact of the matter is that the only relevant aspect of professionalism here is the amount of money involved. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you can afford to test your software on a wide variety of machines with a large QA staff to run the whole exercise. Microsoft and Apple have the billions; Canonical does not.
All that said, there are any number of free software packages out there that are polished and refined and blow away their commercial competitors, so it plainly can be done. On the other hand, an operating system and all of its associated software is a lot more complicated than any single application, so testing it thoroughly has got to be a daunting task. Moreover, the risk and effort involved in downloading the latest Firefox beta is much less than downloading and installing an operating system beta, so there are probably a lot more testers for apps than OS distributions. Still, the last couple of Ubuntu releases have had non-trivial problems, and for a distribution that prides itself on stability, this definitely should serve as a wakeup call to the folks at Canonical.
In the end, though, I'll take a rough start on an Ubuntu point revision over the "professionalism" of Windows Vista and, for that matter, the rough start that many people have reported with Windows 7. And while I'll grant you that OS X is a polished product, several OS X releases have had noteworthy issues, and that doesn't even begin to cover the primitive suckware that passed for the MacOS pre-OS X. Modern operating system development is hard. Neither commercial nor free OS producers do it as well as we'd like. Even so, how much do you want to bet that there are fixes for the problems with Ubuntu 9.10 a good six months to a year before Microsoft issues its first service pack for Windows 7?
Canonical is interested in rushing out bleeding edge versions of Ubuntu twice a year. Canonical is also interrested in stable, long term release versions, called LTS. Mod parent Troll.
Is that why the last LTS had Firefox 3.0 beta 4 installed on it, as well as an unstable and poorly supported soundsystem? Im a fan of ubuntu too, but lets not try to claim that ANY of their releases are anything other than bleeding edge beta quality releases. Ubuntu tends to be most stable several months after the release, even moreso than other distros / OSes.
The Register failed to notice the text in red boldface on that ubuntuforums.org page which states:
"*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."
The statistics derived by The Register are thus invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a nonrepresentative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades.
Here's another nonrepresentative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32bit, 1 upgrade 64bit, 1 conversion 32bit to 64bit). All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32bit to 64bit reinstallation. Being a self-selected non-representative dataset, would that entitle me to proclaim that every Karmic upgrade or installation was flawless? Obviously such a conclusion would be unfounded, and so are those of The Register.
It's tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installations. According to an unofficial monitor on the official torrent tracker, there were over 16 million torrent downloads as of today http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/ [neomenlo.org]. The number of direct downloads from the servers is unknown, and the average number of installations per download is also unknown. BTW, I've uploaded more than 60GB on these two torrents in the last several days from home, and the upload rate is still humming along (I limit each of the torrents to below 1Mbit/sec upload).
It's also tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installation problems. The forum mentioned by The Register probably has only a fraction of those with problems, and that came to about 1400 as of yesterday. Comparing this number to the number of torrent downloads would give 1 in 10,000 but that would also be an example of bad statistics, since both of the numbers are incomplete to an unknown extent or nonrepresentative to an unknown extent.
Systematically incomplete nonrepresentative data produces incorrect statistics. It's the old adage: GIGO.
they can deliver something on time, rather than delivering something good
I'm using Karmic on three computers, one fresh install and two upgrades from Jaunty.
All of them are good - one is Xubuntu on a lower-specced laptop and it feels quicker, both booting up and in use. The biggest problem was the current MythStream not working with V0.22 of MythTV.
Mine is a disaster. Now am I dropping Ubuntu? No, I'll drop back to 9.04 (I have all the data - I've been around the block enough times to not make that mistake). However, I might look at Red Hat if the problems aren't resolved quickly.
And here's the advantage of Linux - I can move to another supplier, I'm not locked in.
Why do people insist on trotting out their own experiences of success
Because my experiences match that of the vast majority of Ubuntu users.
Just as the people who are caught up in the "endless reboot" problem [computerworld.com] with Windows 7 are a tiny minority, so are those having trouble with Karmic.
Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
My "difficulties" are that a single plugin for a single program hasn't been updated yet. The author of the plugin has been notified and has provided a beta update [kabelfoon.nl]beta update. I have no doubt that I'll be seeing the release version in my update manager soon.
Vista had some really pathetic issues for *months* after it was released. I expect at least these issues will be cleared up pretty quickly. And as others have pointed out, this isn't an LTS release.
People are justified in trotting out their own experience because the summary asks for it.
For me KK is awesome, because I finally have accelerated graphics on my Dell Mini 9. I tried setting it up on jaunty a couple of times before but just assumed that my netbook didn't have the right chipset or enough graphics memory to run compiz. Now my netbook has all the benefits of the Ubuntu installation on my MBP (avant window navigator being one of my favourite things about it, 3D desktop cube and wibbly windows next), and more.
The only backwards step I've noticed so far is that the battery app in the system tray now just gives charge level as a percentage, with no time remaining or time to charge info. I don't think I had to install a custom app for that before. Strange.
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
If you want to compare Karmic release with other releases based on this poll anyway here are the previous polls :
That poll is not scientific (people who find the poll are more likely to be people with problems), and out of people who upgraded the success rate is 68%. It is listed as 35% because they count successful installs separately from upgrades. Checking the polls for previous releases, the numbers are pretty much the same as this one.
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.
There are a couple things that I'm inclined to point out. First, the article is basically saying, "some people had trouble, some people were unimpressed." It's hardly a scientific study of the quality of the OS. Sometimes the complainers are the most vocal, and the people who are happy sit quietly.
But more important, just a bit of advice for anyone who got burned by the upgrade and are upset: if your computer is important to you, don't be an early adopter. Just because a new version of your OS comes out doesn't mean you need to upgrade right away. Sit and wait to hear what people say about it, and wait for some of the kinks to get ironed out.
I'm not making excuses. Yeah, sure, it'd be better if Canonical would make sure that every release was perfect right out of the gate, but still, exercise some common sense. If you've been doing this for any amount of time, you should know better by now, especially since it has happened with pretty much every single OS. When Vista was released, it was a buggy POS. Yes, I used it. They cleaned it up well enough, but it wasn't any good when it was released. I forget which release of OSX it was (maybe 10.3?), but one of them erased your external hard drives if they were connected when you installed the new OS. That made it really fun if you had just backed up your data to an external hard drive in preparation for the upgrade. And I think it was FreeBSD 5 where everyone was complaining about how crappy it was for months after release.
Whatever system it is, you just can't trust blindly that they'll have it in perfect working order on day 1. If you want to be an early adopter, great, you get to help work out the kinks. Otherwise, give it at least a month or two.
I wish I could mod you up. For the record, I love Ubuntu, but I tend to run only the LTS releases. They are the ones that Canonical and the community put all their effort into for running production systems. I have never had a problem upgrading dapper (6.06 LTS) to Hardy (8.04 LTS), but I have had small problems with some of the intermediate releases.
I had been playing with Karmic-server on VMs for about a month now, but nothing production. Finally I popped a liveCD onto my laptop, played around in Karmic, realized everything worked beautifully, and bit the bullet and a few dist upgrades from Hardy to Karmic. I have not regretted it, but if someone does have problems with the newer possibly less-stable software, they should be sticking with the LTS releases. If you want to push the limit, try new software, you can run the newest release whether or not it's LTS. If you would like to try before you mess with your production system, use the liveCD or make a BACKUP that you know how to restore from. Sheesh....
Sorry to the people who have problems, but I'd have to say my system feels a lot faster now. Boots faster, and compiz with all its 3d effects are a lot smoother with on my builtin intel card than they ever were with previous releases. I am a happy karmic user:)
Funny, and all this time I thought the majority of the reason people use Windows is because it comes pre-installed on all the computers that they buy. The fact it 'just works' is because the people who make the systems have already prebuilt the systems with a tested and verified image that works on that specific hardware being purchased.
If they did the same with Linux, which some distributions do, then it would 'just work' as well.
I mean, get real. Can you imagine grandma getting a barebone system and installing Windows 7/Vista/Xp from cd, then having to search the internet for the drivers required for the hardware that isn't automatically recognized?
Pretty much the same headache grandma would have looking for any missing linux drivers, and funny enough, in a bare-bone install, linux is likely to support more out of the box than Windows. Go figure.
So for the 'lack of tinkering', you have to thank Microsoft and their excellent marketing division and their stranglehold on the hardware corporation.
Well, then they don't want windows either. The fact windows needs 'tinkering' as you put it is why there is an entire PC support industry in the first place.
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
The two boot screens look sparse and cold to me. I wondered if Mark Shuttleworth was paying people back for the complaints about his "human" color scheme. The GDM window looks ugly to me. I definitely want the old one back.
Problems plugging in an external monitor on my netbook. Workarounds are available, so it's tolerable. On the upside, it seems a bit better on batter life. Strangely, I'm not seeing any improvement in boot times, which people seem so obsessed with. Until it's under 10 seconds for my netbook, I'm sticking with suspend/hibernate.
The new disk utility picked up the informed me that my laptop disk is in serious need of replacing, which is a nice thing to know before it fails. Overall, not as smooth an upgrade as Jaunty, but not bad.
Make sure your GRUB shows the new 2.6.31 kernel.
When I upgraded, the kernel installed, but it didn't run update-grub, and so my GRUB menu didn't show the new kernel.
When it booted into the old kernel, I had the same problem as you, where it showed that no audio devices were installed. Merely booting into the proper new kernel fixed it.
Bad Karma (Score:5, Funny)
indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
me being one of the early adopters that got stung
I haven't seen so many bugs and reboots since the days of windows 95
Re:indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh* We see these kinds of articles on every major new release of Ubuntu/Fedora/Windows/OSX. This is NOT news. When you're swapping out major parts of your OS and applications, things are bound to break. I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy or anything, but this kind of stuff gets on my nerves. To everyone who claims they were "stung" by this update, I have two questions:
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
Parent
My experience (Score:4, Informative)
Blank and flickering screens: No
Failure to recognize hard drives: No
Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: No
Failure to get encryption running:
Sorta, but only because my computer took a dive in the middle of the live upgrade. I had to remount / read-write from an emergency console and run apt-get again. Or actually it told me to run "dpkg --configure -a" to correct it. That installed most things, but I had to reboot into the normal recovery console and run last updates. Rebooted and...
Working flawlessly with full disk encryption and everything. No problems with anything so far, that's my anecdotal evidence at least.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Funny)
That's what you call working flawlessly? When it kicks you into an emergency console in which you had to remount your hard disks manually in read-write mode and run the package reconfigure command?
Clearly 2009 is not yet the year of Linux on the desktop.
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Re:My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
From that point on, yes - everything works and everything boots normally now. It didn't handle an unexpected reboot in the middle of the upgrade gracefully, but I don't know any consumer OS that reliably does.
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Fairly painless upgrade... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had a fairly painless upgrade from Jaunty on two laptops and a desktop. What is weird for me is how it interacted with VirtualBox; after the upgrade, my username was missing from the vboxusers group and my XP VMs no longer saw the USB hub; easy to fix once I figured it out, but really frustrating.
I've installed it on... (Score:4, Interesting)
My primary desktop at home, a 2nd desktop at work, and before release, I had the beta and then RC running in VM's for a few weeks. None of these had problems. Then again most of this is on older hardware (p4's with similar era video cards, etc).
Ubuntu needs to put a YMMV disclaimer :P
netbook remix (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty smooth (Score:4, Interesting)
Encrypted home folders, a balanced look... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some niggling bugs and lack of polish, but this isn't anything like Canonical Vista, despite what some people are hyping.
Re:Encrypted home folders, a balanced look... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The plural of anecdote isn't data (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we're trading unsubstantiated anecdotes, let me say that my experience with Karmic Koala has been perfectly smooth. I have it running natively on one machine and inside a VirtualBox VM on another, and in both instances both the install process and the system as a whole have worked very satisfyingly.
There's a shocker... (Score:5, Interesting)
Canonical has made no secret of the fact that deadlines are more important to them than milestones. They shoot (ostensibly) for "usability", not stability.
Unbuntu 9.10 better than... (Score:4, Interesting)
It runs better than 9.04 on this machine that I am using. This is a K6-3D/400 with 256M and 10G drive. It was upgraded from 7.04 - 16 hours per release.
Issues since 9.10...
Failure during boot get Xwindows/gnome to start. On new log on screen is now a choice of gnome and safe gnome. Just change to the other one and boots OK.
During first boot Netscape kept kicking errors about xorg. Those when a way on second full boot.
Do not like new update apt just showing up with a click. Liked better the icon in tool bar.
Upgrading on an ASUS EEE 901 (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience upgrading 9.04 to 9.10 Kubuntu:
I needed to make room to upgrade, because the 4 Gb SSD in the EEE was close to full. I have my /home partition on the 12 Gb SSD, so I needed to clean out things like the apt cache. Eventually, I had to remove some bigger packages like Picasa (with Wine) and Open Office to free up enough space on /.
With 50 Mb more than it claims it wanted, it finally started.
Halfway thru the upgrade, it froze and I had to reboot. Packages had been downloaded, but not all installed.
I had to reboot using a rescue USB stick and chroot over to the main disk. I tried an apt-get dist-upgrade and it said the system was hosed, and suggested a dpkg -a something rescue command. I did that and it finished processing the files it had. I then rebooted into "recovery mode" on that version, and did the dist-upgrade again and it finished. Another reboot and it was successfully in a normal login.
I logged in and immediately did and apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get autoremove to get the half-dozen updates and clean things up. I then added back in Open Office and a few other missing packages that I cleaned out to make space.
The only thing I can say is in the end, it worked. I've had upgrade horrors like this before with Slackware -- which I have *NEVER* successfully upgraded. They *ALL* had to be re-installs, which is one of the big reasons why I no longer use Slackware. In the past, upgrades have gone smoothly with (K)Ubuntu, as well as my CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat systems. This one was one of the worst.
It is nice, one running. Very slick, and I am mostly quite happy with the way it operates. The only bug I've bumped into that is new is if I'm running on battery, and the battery gets low enough for the system to issue a warning, kicker dies. No, I haven't reported it, yet. Probably later tonight I'll see if I can get a backtrace and send it over.
My experience would have really stumped a Linux noob. There needs to be a bit more Q&A. I got the feeling there was a bit of "let's push out on the Windows 7 day, no matter what" going on.
I run it on a Macbook (Score:5, Interesting)
The upgrade was a bit rough - the GUI system update tools are very prone to breaking, often freezing to the point that only a forcequit can put things back to normal (I almost always use the command line because of that). Unfortunately the only way I knew of to update to 9.10 was using a GUI tool, which naturally broke, forcing me to restart the upgrade (although it was called a "partial upgrade". As for the finished product, booting time is abysmal, pushing past 100 sec. and the wireless doesn't work without a driver (it worked flawlessly in 9.04), and even with the driver whenever I move around any new wireless networks I come across aren't recognized - I need to suspend/unsuspend to restart the wireless system and get the new access points recognized. And the monitor randomly shuts off once in a while. And the mouse (trackpad) moves erratically sometimes.
Either I should switch to some other distro or I need better hardware.
Upgraded 3 computers (Score:4, Interesting)
All 3 to Karmic. All 3 work great. None are even remotely similar hardware wise. As an added bonus the power saving on my laptop works better than my wife's Vista machine now which is definitely a great upgrade.
My Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't had any show stopping problems. I've found it to be waaay better than 9.04. The sound works far better (it used to not work for some apps), as does compiz.
Oddly, the only thing that didn't work about Ubuntu One. It complained that I had a version too new for the servers. *shrug*
Numerous problems, all downgrades from Jaunty (Score:4, Informative)
Unlike previous releases where I jumped in fairly early in the beta process (beta 2 or 3), I waited to move to Karmic until the release. I also decided to do a clean install this time to ensure I wouldn't run into any upgrade issues.
Unfortunately, despite the supposed "papercut" fixes, this release seems far more prone to problems. On my Dell Latitude 620 (with Intel graphics, mind you):
About the only good thing I can say (which may also be attributed to the larger 500G drive I swapped in for the install), is that overall the system seems smoother and more responsive.
Register Bloodied by Lack of Research (Score:5, Informative)
Typically, I read and respect The Register. They usually run intriguing technology articles that make me think. I'm quite disappointed with today's carelessly researched piece, specifically, the paragraphs regarding eCryptfs.
Lack of automation? In Ubuntu 9.10, encrypting your home directory is a matter of selecting a check box in the installer: That's it. 9.04 Encrypted Home upgrading users simply run update-manager and upgrade all packages to 9.10. Their home directory encryption is not affected by this.
The author of this article found one post in the Ubuntu Forums poorly articulating an issue with home directory encryption and suddenly Ubuntu 9.10 users are getting "bloodied" by encryption in Ubuntu? Seriously?
I expect better journalism from The Register...
Rants replacing Bug reports? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Linux for 11 years. Before Linux captured 10+% of the desktop market share (according to Ballmer himself!) most of the community was technically oriented and ranting wasn't that common. We understood that those doing the developing were VOLUNTEERS and the best way to help them was to post BUG reports filled with details of the bug that the developer could use to resolve the bug and fix it. IOW, the users were the testers. We understood that and agreed to it. We were patient and our patience was rewarded.
Now, we have a generation of users who don't appreciate or care that most of the developers are still volunteers. These users don't care that they get the OS, the desktop and tens of thousands of high quality apps for free. Even worse, they don't want to take the time to take notes of the problem they think they are having and file factual bug reports at application's bugzilla site. What they will take time to do is write rants in blogs and news groups. Rants that are devoid of facts or knowledge but long on flames and vituperations. Thankfully, most developers know about these kinds of "Penguins" and ignore them. What else can they do? The rants rarely contain useful information and the developer doesn't have the time to search the countless blogs and forums for rants about his software. If he did he wouldn't get any developing done and he'd get discouraged and quit, which would make Microsoft happy,
To make matters worse, many ranters are serial ranters. They aren't satisfied with ranting in a single forum or blog. They visit as many as the can and post essentially the same rant in all of them. This makes the ranter appear to be part of a larger movement when, in fact, he is not. There were several ranters in the KDE4 dustup that were identified as serial ranters, and for a year and a half you could track them through the Linux sites as they dropped one rant after another. If someone called them on the topic of a rant they'd switch topics in their next rant. It didn't matter. The purpose was to destroy KDE4, if possible, and force developers back to KDE 3.5.x. The ranters were totally ignorant of the technical issues and reasons why KDE was redesigned from the bottom up.
The examples of stupid rants are almost endless. One ranter registered on a forum just to make his first post a rant against KDE 4.2.1 because "IT didn't have a way to change the menu structure to KDE 3.5.10's." Read the documentation? NO! It takes too much time and he's much too important to do such trival stuff. Ask a question on the forum instead of ranting for his first post? NO! He's not about to humiliate himself by asking a newbie question.
So, he rants. The first reply states "right click on the K-Gear menu icon and select "Convert to classic menu".
Now, everybody knows that not only is he a mindless ranter, he is also an idiot.
The problem is that his subject line appears in some Google search of "Problems with Ubuntu" and adds at least one count, or more if the rant is picked up by multiple blogs, to the number of users supposedly having trouble with Kubuntu (or Ubuntu). Someone takes the results of that search and extrapolates it into a story about how "Some Early Adopters Stung By Kbuntu's Karmic Koala".
Meanwhile, my Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 instalation on my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H notebook with an Intel GM45 video chip continues to hum like the perfect combination that it is. Did I say that I checked the compatibility of my notebook with Linux before I installed Linux on it?
Re:Professionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony is too good...
Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism...
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Re:Professionalism (Score:4, Interesting)
I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and it is quite buggy. Much more than previous releases. I have had to go back to the NDIS wrapper to use my WG511 PCMCIA wifi adapter. I haven't had to do that in years.
My observations [glitch.tl].
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Re:Professionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Debian does go through great lengths, and people complained that the time between releases was too long.
Then they switched to Ubuntu.
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Re:Professionalism (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's not to say that sticking with old versions is always bad, it's just that the method of deciding what's stable is literally "is it old?". Why not test things and then update, instead of arbitrarily picking a version and declaring it to be stable? Or keep track of projects that release safe code and give them 2 weeks to make sure there's no horrible bugs, and then update (like what exactly is the reason for holding back Firefox and Pidgin?).
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Re:Professionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
How much did those users pay for their copy of Karmic?
Yes, it does make a difference. If I pay for a finished product, I expect it to be finished. If someone hands me a CD and says try this, I will try it, but not get upset if it doesn't work out perfectly.
In this society that we call open source, we fully understand that Canonical doesn't have the resources to run large test labs. We also know that we get the product for free, and can ban together with a large cadre of like-minded folks to fix problems that we do find. Most Ubuntu releases are initially full of problems. They tend to dissipate much quicker than your first Service Pack that you'll get from the behemoth that HAS charged you enough to do some proper engineering and testing.
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Re:Professionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. That's why I'm still running XP on the Windows side of the box and have no plans whatsoever -- nor really any motivation -- to upgrade to Windows 7. And the next box will likely be running XP under virtualization. Odds are that it will be quite some time before there is any significant Windows software that won't run under XP.
You can bandy the word "professionalism" around with all of its varied meanings and hope that no one here is literate enough to call you on it -- this is Slashdot, after all -- but the fact of the matter is that the only relevant aspect of professionalism here is the amount of money involved. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you can afford to test your software on a wide variety of machines with a large QA staff to run the whole exercise. Microsoft and Apple have the billions; Canonical does not.
All that said, there are any number of free software packages out there that are polished and refined and blow away their commercial competitors, so it plainly can be done. On the other hand, an operating system and all of its associated software is a lot more complicated than any single application, so testing it thoroughly has got to be a daunting task. Moreover, the risk and effort involved in downloading the latest Firefox beta is much less than downloading and installing an operating system beta, so there are probably a lot more testers for apps than OS distributions. Still, the last couple of Ubuntu releases have had non-trivial problems, and for a distribution that prides itself on stability, this definitely should serve as a wakeup call to the folks at Canonical.
In the end, though, I'll take a rough start on an Ubuntu point revision over the "professionalism" of Windows Vista and, for that matter, the rough start that many people have reported with Windows 7. And while I'll grant you that OS X is a polished product, several OS X releases have had noteworthy issues, and that doesn't even begin to cover the primitive suckware that passed for the MacOS pre-OS X. Modern operating system development is hard. Neither commercial nor free OS producers do it as well as we'd like. Even so, how much do you want to bet that there are fixes for the problems with Ubuntu 9.10 a good six months to a year before Microsoft issues its first service pack for Windows 7?
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Canonical is interested in rushing out bleeding edge versions of Ubuntu twice a year. Canonical is also interrested in stable, long term release versions, called LTS. Mod parent Troll.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a Debian that stable, use Debian. :)
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because when you go to download it, it asks you which version you want. It even explains the LTS thing.
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Bad statistics - GIGO (Score:5, Insightful)
"*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."
The statistics derived by The Register are thus invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a nonrepresentative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades. Here's another nonrepresentative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32bit, 1 upgrade 64bit, 1 conversion 32bit to 64bit). All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32bit to 64bit reinstallation. Being a self-selected non-representative dataset, would that entitle me to proclaim that every Karmic upgrade or installation was flawless? Obviously such a conclusion would be unfounded, and so are those of The Register.
It's tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installations. According to an unofficial monitor on the official torrent tracker, there were over 16 million torrent downloads as of today http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/ [neomenlo.org]. The number of direct downloads from the servers is unknown, and the average number of installations per download is also unknown. BTW, I've uploaded more than 60GB on these two torrents in the last several days from home, and the upload rate is still humming along (I limit each of the torrents to below 1Mbit/sec upload).
It's also tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installation problems. The forum mentioned by The Register probably has only a fraction of those with problems, and that came to about 1400 as of yesterday. Comparing this number to the number of torrent downloads would give 1 in 10,000 but that would also be an example of bad statistics, since both of the numbers are incomplete to an unknown extent or nonrepresentative to an unknown extent.
Systematically incomplete nonrepresentative data produces incorrect statistics. It's the old adage: GIGO.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm using Karmic on three computers, one fresh install and two upgrades from Jaunty.
All of them are good - one is Xubuntu on a lower-specced laptop and it feels quicker, both booting up and in use. The biggest problem was the current MythStream not working with V0.22 of MythTV.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mine is a disaster. Now am I dropping Ubuntu? No, I'll drop back to 9.04 (I have all the data - I've been around the block enough times to not make that mistake). However, I might look at Red Hat if the problems aren't resolved quickly.
And here's the advantage of Linux - I can move to another supplier, I'm not locked in.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Because my experiences match that of the vast majority of Ubuntu users.
Just as the people who are caught up in the "endless reboot" problem [computerworld.com] with Windows 7 are a tiny minority, so are those having trouble with Karmic.
Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
My "difficulties" are that a single plugin for a single program hasn't been updated yet. The author of the plugin has been notified and has provided a beta update [kabelfoon.nl]beta update. I have no doubt that I'll be seeing the release version in my update manager soon.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Vista had some really pathetic issues for *months* after it was released. I expect at least these issues will be cleared up pretty quickly. And as others have pointed out, this isn't an LTS release.
People are justified in trotting out their own experience because the summary asks for it.
For me KK is awesome, because I finally have accelerated graphics on my Dell Mini 9. I tried setting it up on jaunty a couple of times before but just assumed that my netbook didn't have the right chipset or enough graphics memory to run compiz. Now my netbook has all the benefits of the Ubuntu installation on my MBP (avant window navigator being one of my favourite things about it, 3D desktop cube and wibbly windows next), and more.
The only backwards step I've noticed so far is that the battery app in the system tray now just gives charge level as a percentage, with no time remaining or time to charge info. I don't think I had to install a custom app for that before. Strange.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
On the very poll you linked to it says this -
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
If you want to compare Karmic release with other releases based on this poll anyway here are the previous polls :
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a couple things that I'm inclined to point out. First, the article is basically saying, "some people had trouble, some people were unimpressed." It's hardly a scientific study of the quality of the OS. Sometimes the complainers are the most vocal, and the people who are happy sit quietly.
But more important, just a bit of advice for anyone who got burned by the upgrade and are upset: if your computer is important to you, don't be an early adopter. Just because a new version of your OS comes out doesn't mean you need to upgrade right away. Sit and wait to hear what people say about it, and wait for some of the kinks to get ironed out.
I'm not making excuses. Yeah, sure, it'd be better if Canonical would make sure that every release was perfect right out of the gate, but still, exercise some common sense. If you've been doing this for any amount of time, you should know better by now, especially since it has happened with pretty much every single OS. When Vista was released, it was a buggy POS. Yes, I used it. They cleaned it up well enough, but it wasn't any good when it was released. I forget which release of OSX it was (maybe 10.3?), but one of them erased your external hard drives if they were connected when you installed the new OS. That made it really fun if you had just backed up your data to an external hard drive in preparation for the upgrade. And I think it was FreeBSD 5 where everyone was complaining about how crappy it was for months after release.
Whatever system it is, you just can't trust blindly that they'll have it in perfect working order on day 1. If you want to be an early adopter, great, you get to help work out the kinks. Otherwise, give it at least a month or two.
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Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Interesting)
I had been playing with Karmic-server on VMs for about a month now, but nothing production. Finally I popped a liveCD onto my laptop, played around in Karmic, realized everything worked beautifully, and bit the bullet and a few dist upgrades from Hardy to Karmic. I have not regretted it, but if someone does have problems with the newer possibly less-stable software, they should be sticking with the LTS releases. If you want to push the limit, try new software, you can run the newest release whether or not it's LTS. If you would like to try before you mess with your production system, use the liveCD or make a BACKUP that you know how to restore from. Sheesh....
Sorry to the people who have problems, but I'd have to say my system feels a lot faster now. Boots faster, and compiz with all its 3d effects are a lot smoother with on my builtin intel card than they ever were with previous releases. I am a happy karmic user
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Re:Professionalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, and all this time I thought the majority of the reason people use Windows is because it comes pre-installed on all the computers that they buy. The fact it 'just works' is because the people who make the systems have already prebuilt the systems with a tested and verified image that works on that specific hardware being purchased.
If they did the same with Linux, which some distributions do, then it would 'just work' as well.
I mean, get real. Can you imagine grandma getting a barebone system and installing Windows 7/Vista/Xp from cd, then having to search the internet for the drivers required for the hardware that isn't automatically recognized?
Pretty much the same headache grandma would have looking for any missing linux drivers, and funny enough, in a bare-bone install, linux is likely to support more out of the box than Windows. Go figure.
So for the 'lack of tinkering', you have to thank Microsoft and their excellent marketing division and their stranglehold on the hardware corporation.
Cheers.
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Re:Professionalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, then they don't want windows either. The fact windows needs 'tinkering' as you put it is why there is an entire PC support industry in the first place.
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Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
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Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
The two boot screens look sparse and cold to me. I wondered if Mark Shuttleworth was paying people back for the complaints about his "human" color scheme. The GDM window looks ugly to me. I definitely want the old one back.
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Re:Karmic Koala - mostly Karmic (Score:4, Informative)
The new disk utility picked up the informed me that my laptop disk is in serious need of replacing, which is a nice thing to know before it fails. Overall, not as smooth an upgrade as Jaunty, but not bad.
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Re:I got a bit stung (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, did you say everything went smoothly except you didn't have sound or video ?
That right there is why Linux hasn't gone mainstream.
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Re:I got a bit stung (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Only Use LTS (Score:5, Informative)
...6 months releasing cycles are a joke. Just look at how long Windows 7 has been tested before release.
Then use Debian.
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