The entire article mentions only one bug, which is caused by proprietary drivers. Seems more like FUD to me. And yes I had a smooth upgrade to Karmic-amd64 with proprietary ATI drivers.
Ubuntu 8.10 broke Intel drivers, which are OSS. Furthermore Ubuntu ships with restricted drivers manager, which pragmatically installs properietary drivers where needed.
Software vendors have the resposibility to their users to perform regression tests as part of their product. If Ubuntu doesn't want do do that, or do it better, then they shouln't bother to compete with other OSs that do.
I'm saying this after 10+ years of use of Linux on my desktop. The 8.10 issue (after deliberately picking low-powered OSS-driven hardware) made me move to OS X, which I hate, in order to have a continuously working desktop.
I have Ubuntu on my desktop and server, and OS X on my laptop. Personally I've experienced less problems with Ubuntu. I use proprietary 64bit ATI and my upgrade was smooth.
Considering I'd pay money for Ubuntu, I'm very happy to get it for free. If you're worried about stability, I suggest using the long term releases instead of upgrading to the cutting edge right away. If you want the cutting edge, wait a month before upgrading so the bugs can be worked out.
It's also important to remember that you are not a customer with a support contract with Canonical. You are a customer getting a great operating system for free. Something to factor into your calculations.
'If you're worried about stability, I suggest using the long term releases instead of upgrading to the cutting edge right away.'
The stable release didn't completely support using an external monitor on my video card. Seeing as I do presentations for a living, that's not so great.
'It's also important to remember that you are not a customer with a support contract with Canonical. You are a customer getting a great operating system for free. Something to factor into your calculations.'
From knowing a couple of people who work at Canonical, I honestly doubt Canonical support would consider lack of external monitor support a real bug.
I moved my home desktop back to Windows XP after Ubuntu 8.10 was released. It's the most stable desktop Operating System I know of. I never lost a file on it. I've never been unable to boot. I've never had hardware that wouldn't work on it. I have experienced quite a bit of Apple drama and figured it's just not worth the money. If I need to do any unixy stuff I have a button on my desktop that instantly launches an EC2 instance I can ssh into. Costs me about $1/month.
You've never used it enough then :) all Operating systems have roughly equal "failure" rates in my experience (Fedora, W7 [this might change] and Server 2003 slightly lower / Ubuntu slightly higher than normal).
I work with a shed load of different operating systems working in a variety of capacities daily (though not so much in OSX). I haven't come across an operating system yet that recognises all hardware painlessly, doesn't come with a variety of random errors and doesn't ever crash :)
XP is great, until you try to do too much with it. Installing video codecs in beta or under development? I got system freezes galore. Didn't happen to me under OS X.
It's stuff like this which makes me think that the release cycle for Ubuntu is just too brisk. I've just recently managed to get two 8.10 installs to the point where they're comfortably configured and stable. I'm still working out a few issues with Jaunty on a netbook. There's no way I'm going to upgrade that thing to Karmic for maybe six months or so. Granted, this makes me an LTS guy and not an early adopter, but I don't think my situation is unique.
I wonder if this is truly a widespread issue. I've been using Karmic daily since the beta was released a few weeks ago, upgrading its packages to the official release, and I haven't encountered any issues yet. Has anyone here had any of the problems described in the article?
I've experienced the flickering screen problem which is caused by a rapidly restarting X server (on nvidia-chipset graphics).
In earlier releases gdm seemed to throttle this after 5 attempts and present a text-mode dialog. By default now all is left to the xorg auto-discovery (no config file), so I assume that this fallback was no longer deemed necessary by the Ubuntu folks.
I resorted to booting the computer with a usb-stick, temporarily disabling /etc/init/gdm.conf (or however that upstart-thing now is called, I forgot), then installing the morally questionable :-) nvidia-binary drivers via envy. Works great so far (under bare metal and via VirtualBox as a guest hosted by Windows7).
Widespread graphics driver and sound issues. GNOME-Do, System Monitor and some other programs. Launchpad is going berserk right now. http://bit.ly/1IPSsm
Believe it or not, I've upgraded Ubuntu successfully several times through the GUI. Before Ubuntu 7.x this tended to fail spectacularly though. It's a very friendly process when it works, which admittedly seems contingent on the maturity of the release in question.
I've done the Ubuntu GUI-based in-place upgrade for the last three releases, if I count back correctly. Aside from the usual point issues in peripheral things that show up when you agree to use a beta (spotty sound in one old game, e.g.), the actual upgrade itself has worked correctly every time.
The concept or way to upgrade it is ok... it's just that it almost always causes a lot more trouble than a clean install.
My experiences so far :
6->7 : System failure, unable to boot
8.04 -> 8.10 : Alright overall, a few bugs to fix (most concerned X)
8.10 -> 9.04 : Better, still a few bugs (info tooltips, graphic card drivers)
I had two issues, one during the upgrade process, the second with proprietary wireless network drivers. I upgraded a 3-years old HP laptop from Windows XP. My initial plan was to make it boot both systems, but the install hang up during repartition, destroying Windows. Oh, well, isn't that what Linux is for, to destroy Windows? The second problem was just an annoying non-issue, solved by finding the right aptitude incantations.
Apart from that, Karmic has been a cute little boy all along.
I've been told to wait with the Snow Leopard update, too. Update of Ubuntu on my second notebook really produced some errors, but after a clean install (often a good idea anyway), it looks great. For the first time I did not immediately switch off the desktop effects.
Updated my Advent laptop from Jaunty a week ago, no significant issues. Can't say it's massively better than Jaunty in terms of features or performance though.
