Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala • The Register
Hope Mandriva is doing better (released a new version yesterday?) or this might not bode well for openSUSE 11.2 which is due in just one week.
I see another topic has been started about it here:
http://forums.opensuse.org/general-chit-chat/424645-not-good-start-ubuntu-karmic.html
If some moderator happens to stumble upon this one, feel free to close it 
Whooh… I shiver with fear of the same thing happening to openSUSE 11.2… 
That’s partly why the openSUSE people made the decision to release a new version every eight months, so that there would be more time to build and test the software. A six-months release schedule is a bit too short.
Ubuntu Karmic seems to have made a very bad start… I hope this means more openSUSE users. 
Oh let the Uboobooers re-install the OS, or Windows, and then they can eat their Cheerios with some humble pie!
Silly Ubooboo users. Oh I can hear he birds chirping. The Ubooboo fanatics are not so loud at the moment.
As long as OpenSuSE 11.2 is better than 11.1, then I’ll be happy. If 11.2 is as fun as 11.1… then I’ll have to take seat with some of the the Ubooboo fans and ask them to pass the salt for my slice of humble pie.
Yes we can all listen with pride as Steve Jobs tells us to: “… all eat cake!”
HA! rotfl! That report was really amusing.
But I must say that the writer was completely right. Windows users migrating to Linux are usually directed to Ubuntu and if they end up with such a buggy, horrible release like Karmic, they’ll go back to Windows and never come back… Though some might go to Fedora or openSUSE or some other distro.
I don’t think this is amusing at all. Just think about the energy etc. your own distro has to put up to overcome yet another piece of negative publicity.
Heavy criticism on Canonical? Agreed. But Ubuntu users have made the same choice: linux / open source. No need to ridicule them as some kind of inferior linux users. Maybe my age but using open source software to me includes the duty to support, not to mock.
Well said. I remember when this sort of thing happened to openSUSE. It was around the time of 10.3 when they decided to switch package managers and go with zypper. Even the devs were saying not to use zypper but to use smart. Those of us who were there, remember that nightmare.
We all go through a rough patch. Why poke fun at someone because they hit theirs? openSUSE isn’t perfect. No distro is. We are a community if Linux users, first and foremost. Distros are just the way they package things with the Linux kernel to make a complete and usable OS.
Having used Ubuntu since 7.04 I have gradually seen it improve and lately seen the reverse. For me I can no longer use Ubuntu basically just because the issues that have caused me issues are not being resolved.
This is why I have move to opensuse as the issues are just not present in this distro. So clearly distro related, so for me I’m not surprised at the issues users are reporting from the new release.
I had installed 9.10 on office PC(then back to openSUSE after two 2 days), and personally i would not blame Ubuntu devs for any problem. Come on, why always after Ubuntu. Is it because its Ubuntu OR …, i am tired of reading all this. Things to watch/consider:
People paying a lot of money to those who said, its perfect for your PC, but what at the end… does those who paid for each software not facing any issues/problems.
Why we expecting too much from any thing, why we expecting perfect word from every thing. Those devs are also human, they can do mistakes or can’t they?
So lets appreciate their time and hard work and support them to do better for us, not discourage them by that crappy type of articles over the internet.
Yeh, we can’t keep every one happy.
Its open world to all, use whatever better suits your need.
Cheers.
So what? Their bug#1 states they want to displace Microsoft Windows. To reach that goal, by simple math, you need more bugs. And that is what happened. All is on track, move along.
In other words, the technical people went elsewhere (were they ever there anyway?), letting the crowd hit the wall.
Well said :). These guys either missed or are forgetting the serious issues with the 10.1 package management disaster, the 10.2 font rendering weakness, and the early growing-pain bugs of 10.3 and 11.1, even so the latter two turned into well performing and stable releases. Hopefully the various ubunti will sort it quickly.
Public apology to all offended Ubuntu users. But Ubuntu, at least make Lucid Lynx a bit better.
The problem with this is that Ubuntu is regarded as the most popular desktop distro and the one new users will most likely try first. Any Ubuntu negativity will also reflect badly in Linux in general which was the point of that article I guess.
The point about Linux is that there is choice and although I have my preference for openSUSE and found some of the other distros not as comfortable or their forums a little less friendly I’m still not happy when a distro gets negative publicity.
It’s things like this that some stupid news channel will pick up, spin it in a even more negative way because they didn’t do proper research and then suddenly then masses think Linux is a joke. That sort of damage can take years to undo. Not to mention the mileage the marketing department of Redmond giant will get out of this.
Bad news is an easier sell for reporters. Hardly anyone will listen if they report a cat climbed a tree and it took a concerned
fireman 5 minutes to bring the kitty down. But change it to “today a child confined to a wheelchair lost her best friend. If it weren’t for the heroic efforts of a fireman who at great risk to himself scaled the tree to bring the kitten to safety, we may not have had a happy ending to this story.”
It’s too bad our reporters can weld such unprofessional journalism to solicit an audience. When reporters speak of Windows they are in fact talking about the kernel, window manager, desktop, as a whole since all are inclusive of a version from a distributor. They just don’t seem to get that Ubuntu is a distributor of Linux who may have made a mess of it’s distro. The underlying kernel isn’t a mess and is successfully distributed by many other distributors. So where’s the accountability? the integrity? surely not with the reporters!
That’s also a problem with the users.
I think it’s a very different way of thinking about things - GNU isn’t so much an operating system as an ecosystem, and with open source you aren’t going to find rigid lines demarcating the end of one project and the beginning of another.
The number of people commenting on Linux blogs and forums that seem to believe that Ubuntu is Linux to a lesser or greater extent has been noteworthy, and frustrating, for a lot of us.
We’ve also all probably seen posts saying things to the effect that “Linux needs to unite behind one distro / package manager / desktop environment before it can take on Windows / OSX / whoever.”
This seems, to me, to spectacularly miss the point. Evolution has been great up till now, so to really showcase its strength surely we should pick one strain and stick with it?
Maybe rambling a little - but I guess my point is that if many of the users don’t understand what’s going on, and it really takes a mental paradigm shift to accept the reason and the way it works, perhaps it’s a little unfair to expect generic ‘tech’ journalists to get it. Perhaps we should concentrate efforts on taking the actual computer magazines and blogs to task when they get it wrong, and hope for a modest trickle down effect - public reeducation normally starts with the educators.
It’s not all in the user area. The EEEbuntu devs decided that they cannot live with Canonical anymore, breaking there work with every new Ubuntu release.
I think 90% of criticism on Ubuntu is in place. Displacing winduism is a negative approach to begin with, wanting to make the best distro ever, over and over again, completely different. I tested various versions of 9.10 and the least I could say is that it’s buggy, definitely not the best distro ever. Not tested, AFAICS. I’m not waiting for a new kind of Windu OS, untested and unpredictable.
Yes, but generalizing a bit here, that’s not the fault of the so called “journalists”. They work for a company that sells a product. If the punters like reading the bad news they will continue to produce stories about bad news, and they do.
So where’s the accountability? the integrity? surely not with the reporters!
Accountability for the publishing of so many negative stories is with the consumers. It’s consumer driven. However, the accountability for the failures in a distro i.e. the source of bad stories, probably lies more with the projects than with its consumers. The failures themselves are not consumer driven.
Uh, that is not the plan. Microsoft also has lots of damage (“win98 always crashes”, “vista is teh ****”). And? They still have the mass of the users. Let the unsuspecting users think whatever they want to think. Those who have enough enlightenment, or find it by themselves are destined to know for better anyway. Spend less time worrying about unsuspecting users (too time consuming), just make your linux distro the one you like to work with.
I confess that probably like many others, my initial knee-jerk reaction was to thinking that if Ubuntu wants to be in the limelight, then they are held to a higher standard and that they are making linux look bad. However, as I thought about it a bit more, I came to another conclusion. The people that are brave (or adventurous) enough to leave the Windows “comfort zone” for Linux will probably have patience with it and will want it to work. Those that come over to Linux just to immediately return to Windows in disgust without trying to learn anything already had their mind made up before they came over to Linux. I venture to say that most who try Ubuntu to find that it doesn’t meet their needs will at least try a few other distros before deciding on whether to stay with Linux or return to Windows.
My point is that the sincere ones will not be swayed so easily. It’s the closed minded people that want to prove to themselves that Windows is better that would leave before asking for help or giving other distros a try.
That’s probably very true for most cases - I guess there are always exceptions, but as a general rule I think in order to want to learn Linux in the first place, you have to know enough about it to realise that
a) it won’t be plain sailing at first.
b) there are lots of different versions.
c) if you can get past the hard bits, and find a version that suits you, it has concrete, measurable advantages over Windows.
Knowing a few IT pros, I’ve known that Linux had advantages for years, I just never really got round to using it (last time I tried it didn’t like my graphics card). Last year I decided to buy one of these new-fangled Linux netbooks - not because I needed it particularly, but as a project specifically in order to learn Linux.
I didn’t expect to be able to plug it in and do everything I could do on a Windows machine, never mind instantly.
I guess it’s the instant satisfaction crowd that are going to be disappointed with releases like Ubuntu, because instant satisfaction is essentially what Ubuntu is promising. But these people would have been disappointed with any Linux distro, because none of them can auto-configure everything and obscure the technicality to the extent that Windows can.
You can make the case that Ubuntu damages Linux’s reputation by promising something it can’t (yet) deliver, but this must be balanced against the large number of people drawn in by the hype who do find it works acceptably for them. Personally I think they mostly make a good attempt at it, so stuff any exaggerated claims, mostly made on their behalf rather than by them directly… The rest of Linux can carry on producing a technically excellent solution, and accept Ubuntu for what it is; an experimental foray into a different ‘philosophy’ of user interface, which may or may not succeed, but will only be considered representative of ‘Linux as a whole’ by people who didn’t really know enough about Linux to want to learn about it in the first place.