

"Ubuntu 12.04 completely freezes frequently" - SandB0x
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/993187

======
insertnickname
Good job on the LTS, Canonical.

I don't understand why they don't make the release cycle longer. Perhap 9
months or a year, or even just one additional month for QA. I first started
using Ubuntu, and Linux, when 9.04 came out and it was great. Since then the
quality has steadily declined. 9.10 was good too, but ever since 10.04 every
release has sucked. They can't even do LTS releases right.

Sorry for ranting, but the Ubuntu team seems to fuck up time after time.
Perhaps they should try focus on making their system stable, instead of adding
more crap.

~~~
Kerrick
LTS releases are supposed to do this. The six-month releases can be
considered, for all intents and purposes related to stability, "testing"
releases. The LTS releases are supposed to be stable enough for large-scale
rollouts, with three years of desktop and five years of server support. In
fact, Canonical upped the ante with 12.04--five years for both the desktop and
server versions. Of course, plenty of things are supposed to be.

~~~
teilo
LTS means one thing, and one thing only: That they will release security fixes
for it for five years. It has nothing to do with stability and testing.

------
EternalFury
Works fine here. As always, hardware support is tricky.

~~~
marshray
Not only that, accelerated 3D video hardware is as tricky as it gets. Hats off
to the open source developers who attempt it, often having to reverse engineer
some of the most complex hardware known to man.

Am I missing some context here? Why is a nouveau driver crash front page news?

~~~
cookiecaper
It's not a nouveau crash -- the bug report has reports from people using ATI
OSS, nouveau, intel, and nvidia blob drivers (at least).

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Hmm, lots of anecdotes and complaining here. I've experienced no issues of the
sort. Running perfectly smoothly here on 12.04, 64-bit. And I'm on a 4-year-
old Pentium Dual Core machine, of all things.

~~~
bstar77
I did not read through all of the posts, but it appears to be related to
nVidia hardware. I'm guessing that you are not using an nVidia card.

On a side note, I gave up nVidia hardware altogether (about 4 years ago)
because of endless issues with Linux (and macs). This thread isn't
encouraging.

~~~
pthread
I'm running 12.04 since November, I think, with a nvidia card. No issues,
apart from nvidia drivers being crap ever since xserver 1.1

------
spinchange
I found 11.04 & 11.10 to crash on my old Dell Vostro desktop constantly.
Generally speaking, 12.04 has made it feel like a completely new computer.

~~~
mike-cardwell
11.04 used to frequently crash for me too on my Thinkpad T420. I started
building my own 3.0 kernels and that got rid of the crashing problem. I've had
no such problems since I upgraded to 12.04 over a month ago. Works perfectly
here.

------
jl6
How is one supposed to go about debugging these freezes? None of the comments
on the bug appear to offer any insight into the actual cause, or offer much
help in narrowing down the possibilities.

------
ggordan
I had a lot of issues when I upgraded to 11.04 which is why I'm avoiding
upgrading to 12.04. From the looks of it, it seems like a wise decision

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
If you use an x.04 release, you're gonna have a bad time.

~~~
dysoco
It's like, x.10 should be LTS!

------
angry-hacker
Wanted to try out 12.04 (64bit) also. Downloaded Windows installer for Ubuntu
(wubi or what it's called). Everything seemed to work well but after every 15
minutes or so the computer freezes totally for few minutes... when trying to
install something new even longer.

------
xpaulbettsx
This is anecdotal as well, but +1 for the freezing, Ubuntu 12.04 is unusable
on my machine. Even when it's idle, it will last 12hrs at most before a hard
hang, network is dead. I haven't tried to Update All The Things yet though,
hoping that fixes it.

~~~
xpaulbettsx
No dice. Still dead after < 12hrs of uptime.

------
shortlived
As EternalFury says, hardware support is tricky. Ultimately that is why I went
back to windows, I couldn't deal with total system crashes in the middle of
coding or demo'ing and maintaining a windows VM was just a band aid.

------
cherio
There are SO MANY people affected by these freezes:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-
video...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-
intel/+bug/993187)

12.04 release quality is the poorest since I got introduced to 8.04. First
zenity problems, apd and synaptic is crashing several times a day, freezes
that make you hard-reset the machine. It is overwhelming. I switched to XFCE
(xubuntu) for now but otherwise mentally preparing myself for Fedora. So far
no freezes with XFCE.

------
Sodaware
Weird. I've been using 12.04 since it was in beta and it's been stable for me.
The only problem I've had lately has been with flash videos chewing up too
much CPU and causing things to get a little hot.

~~~
rogerbinns
12.04 has been the single worst release ever for me (used Ubuntu since 2006).
These include the Nvidia binary driver crashing, the open source Noveau driver
losing the plot and drawing random content from the wrong windows, a 2 minute
wait booting a laptop waiting for network, compiz move window making life hard
but disabling is even worse, sound applet not showing up, repeatedly disabling
my webcam microphone for no reason, massive increase in power consumption and
the list goes on.

~~~
pthread
I've been having problems with nvidia drivers ever since xserver 1.1

The performance sucks and the gtkperf shows it

Running gtkperf on a laptop with a 943/940gml integrated graphics card Total
time: 7.17

On a laptop with a nvidia 8400 card Total time: 9.08

eeepc 701sd Total time: 25.31

Nothing has changed, while 3D is decent, 2D drawing is a pain, just switching
tabs in firefox makes you want to throw the damn thing out the window.

~~~
rogerbinns
The binary drivers or the nouveau ones? I've always used the binary ones, and
Nvidia's driver quality has been why I've only bought Nvidia cards for many
years. It has only been this release that caused me problems, and even then I
finally solved them by downgrading the Nvidia driver version.

I tried gtkperf to see what figures I get. I did note that the results depend
on the size of the window quite a bit.

On my workstation with an 8800GT I got 3.46 seconds at default window size and
4.08 at 1920x1200 (using mutter window manager). On my 5 year old laptop with
Intel 965 graphics I got 7.30 seconds (using metacity).

I switched to Chrome years ago and its tab switching is fine.

------
krakensden
Because nothing could make the signal to noise ratio on that bug report worse
than posting it to a news aggregator. Thank you, SandB0x. I'm sure everyone on
Ubuntu's XOrg team appreciates it.

~~~
recoiledsnake
You make it sound as if it was posted to lipstick.com. HN mostly has very
technical type of people who are well capable of debugging and eliminating
issues.

Reading the bug reports, I am pretty sure that the signal to noise issue will
actually be better in commments from HN folks.

------
keithpeter
32bit; I had this for a while during testing but not with recent kernel
versions (HP recycled workstation nvidia GT520 graphics), seeing similar on
Debian Wheezy with same kernel numbers. I think we sometimes forget the OS is
Gnu/Linux and the rest is packaging and customisation (nice though that is).

11.10 I had proper black screen kernel panics on the EeePC netbook, again only
during testing.

I might run a live session on 64bit and see what happens.

------
blhack
Maybe this is me not paying attention much lately...

How can a bug like this end up being specific to a distro? Aren't the distros
effectively just different package managers, different init conventions, and
maybe some system management sauce?

The overwhelming majority of the operating system is just: kernel + modules,
GNU, X, and a window manager, isn't it? So how can a bug like this be specific
to Ubuntu?

~~~
anothermachine
1\. Downstream sometimes patches packages to solve problems. Patches can have
bugs.

2\. A bug may be triggered by the presence of two conflicting libraries or
configuration settings that appear in the version sets chosen by a distro.

------
orbitingpluto
I made the mistake of importing Compiz settings that I was using in 10.04 and
11.04 in an attempt to make Ubuntu more usable. It made it completely
unusable.

KDE with nVidia's binary works for me. Everything with Gnome 2, 3 and Unity
has been flickering whenever I move a window and window decorations like to
disappear.

Early adoption of LTS and LTS^ releases is never and increasingly a bad idea.

------
samsnelling
Not going to lie, had to switch back to Win8CP because every time I plugged in
an external monitor and changed the layout it completely froze up. :(

------
josephcooney
Freezes Frequently is a terrible name for a ubuntu release. I'm waiting for
the Incontinent Ibex release for things to sort themselves out....

------
gouranga
Did that for me as well.

debian on the other hand works fine on the same hardware.

~~~
keithpeter
Different kernel version I suppose.

~~~
pm90
Not really. I use Debian Lenny which by default comes with 2.6.x but I've
manually compiled and installed the 3.2.9 kernel. Works flawlessly.

~~~
gouranga
Indeed. I tried arch as well which uses a late 3.x kernel and it worked fine.

I reckon it's a patch somewhere. Ubuntu kernels are a right mess.

------
zmanji
I can't tell if the problem was fixed by installing the vanilla kernel or
reverting to an older Ubuntu kernel. Does anyone have ideas?

------
wildster
I'm glad I have stuck with 11.10!

~~~
rbanffy
Don't be. Unless you use one of the hardware combinations that seem to be
designed to be Linux proof (Sony Vaios, Nvidia GPUs), 12.04 works great.

I'm running 12.04 on a cheap Dell v131 and I'm very happy with it.

------
wissler
I've also experienced locking problems in 12.04 that were very easy to
recreate with a proprietary OpenGL-based program. We reverted back to 11.10
for now.

~~~
sgt
Ubuntu releases are known to bring regression with them, that's just a fact.

~~~
dchest
As opposed to any other software which never bring regressions?

~~~
sgt
Different levels of regression. I have several Ubuntu using friends -
completely normal users - who constantly need help because the Ubuntu upgrade
broke.

I did a 10.04 to 12.04 upgrade on a server the other day. It also broke.
Completely standard with no software installed except for Apache. No
modifications done whatsoever. Upon booting into 12.04, the screen just
flickers. I looked at the log (from ssh) and it had to do with vesafb or
something like that. I didn't bother investigating, and did a plain 12.04
install from ISO.

Things like that, Canonical.

------
bifrost
Death, by Ungabunga.

Seriously, that really can sum it up. Linux has made a lot of inroads, but its
nowhere near the stability of operating systems that spend their time "doing
work" as their first priority.

~~~
kvnn
Are you grouping operating systems into "linux" and "non-linux" categories,
and asserting that the "linux" operating systems are nowhere near as stable?

I'd strongly disagree with that.

~~~
bifrost
If you compare with Solaris, AS/400, OS/390, AIX, FreeBSD, HP/UX, and a few
others - Linux loses bigtime in the uptime department.

That doesn't make Linux less useful, it just hilites the maintenance required.
People (MSFT mainly) use Windows to a high degree of success, they just reboot
it a lot. I have a Linux system that needs to be rebooted every 3-4 days to
maintain usability, I can't do anything about it because the system itself is
essentially closed.

I have a lot of customers who use Linux, the ones who don't have problems
mostly run CentOS. The ubuntu users always seem to have problems, although I
suspect thats usually due to it being developers running systems vs ops
people. The ones who run every other Linux seem pointy headed enough not to
screw themselves over.

ProTip: If you break your box regularly, you are not a good sysadmin.

