Sunday, March 9, 2008

Is Canonical Being Tricky?

I got a message on the forums (back in December, though I didn't see it until today):

Hi there

Thanks for your response to my post (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=630118) titled "My (first round of) Ubuntu 7.10 experiences.

I'd be interested to read your previous rants on the topic ! Are they available in a public forum ? I looked at the rest of the ubuntuforums without finding your posts ...

If Canonical are making a point of using pre-LTS releases as a crash-test, that's an interesting strategy to pursue. But it's a stupid one if they're not going to communicate it to end users, and ever more stupid if they're claiming that every release is as good as every other !

Would be interested in your thoughts / experiences ...

Cheers
Dave
My response to this is:

David,

Sorry that I haven't visited the forums in a while and missed this message. I wasn't ignoring you.

Canonical isn't misrepresenting anything. If fact, their release names show a lot about the releases.
  • Warty Warhog was the first release and had quite a few warts
  • Dapper Drake was the first LTS and showed that it put it's best foot forward.
  • Edgy Eft was a quick release after Dapper and was on the edge, with a lot of broken stuff
  • Gutsy Gibbon put all the cutting edge features they could into the release to iron out the problems before the LTS
  • Hardy will stand up to torture over time

It looks like Hary will be a good release. There aren't that many new features and things are looking great, even though it's still Alpha.

3 comments:

  1. I have also been running hardy for a few weeks, full time, and it is excellent so far, esp for a Alpha.

    this release will be a bit boring, but LTS, so 99% it will be rock solid like you say :)

    Ciao

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't think Ubuntu 8.04 will be any more "rock solid" than other releases. It's based on Debian unstable, which is development version. So ubuntu 8.04 Ubuntu will be as buggy as other ubuntu releases. Actually Ubuntu LTS does mean just that release will be supported longer than other releases. LTS does not mean it's more stable, or better tested than other Ubuntu releases.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mika,

    I disagree. Much more time has been put into making sure that that packages are well integrated than was put into Gutsy, and Gutsy showed it.

    Compiz was turned on by default in Gutsy for the first time. You don't know how many problems this caused. The Screens and Graphics configuration appreared for the first time, and it was quite buggy, Tracker still had huge issues. The printing system changed.

    There are many more things that changed radically in Gutsy, causing usability bugs. Those issues are mostly worked out of Hardy at this point. Even at the Alpha stage, it's still quite solid for day-to-day work.

    We'll see if AMD64 gets the support it should. I sincerely hope so.

    ReplyDelete

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