

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala - urlwolf
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/karmic_koala_frustration/

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whatajoke
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.

~~~
nailer
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.

~~~
tybris
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.

~~~
ErrantX
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 :)

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vorador
I've never seen the register being positive about anything new.

~~~
philwelch
I've never seen the Register being positive about anything.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Checking the authors back catalogue briefly - he does seem to be quite
positive about Windows 7; I wonder if that's a coincidence.

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meatbag
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.

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dennmart
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?

~~~
wyclif
Widespread graphics driver and sound issues. GNOME-Do, System Monitor and some
other programs. Launchpad is going berserk right now. <http://bit.ly/1IPSsm>

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That bitly link is [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-
monit...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-
monitor/+bug/208570) . HNers prefer normal links.

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pcof
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.

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tybris
Never upgrade Ubuntu. Just reinstall. It's not that user-friendly.

~~~
meatbag
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.

~~~
justindz
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.

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daleharvey
"fifth of people upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 have reported issues they can't fix,
according to an Ubuntuforums.org poll here"

wow, statistics in action

I have an issue with fan control with my upgrade, apart from that it went
well, so a little worse than jaunty, but still easier than osx and windows.

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Tichy
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.

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kaveri
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.

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philwelch
Just checked my Karmic Koala server. It does have Linux 2.6.31, but maybe
that's because I've been aggressive about updating it.

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dreaming
Lots of issues for myself and friends too. Shouldn't have updated so soon, but
8.10 - 9.04 didn't feel this problematic.

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manish
Google appengine does not work with 9.10, I have seen it yesterday. There is a
bug as well in appengine buglist

~~~
Tichy
Surely they'll make it work soon. I heard Snow Leopard broke a lot of stuff,
too.

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GiraffeNecktie
First Linux version where everything worked perfectly OOB for me. No
complaints here.

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ekpyrotic
I've had, and continue to have, sound issues.

