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Comment by cosmok | Hacker News Reader

I know it can be frustrating to have a software not work as expected but, I don't think Ubuntu is doing too bad in this respect (I have been using Kubuntu @ work and Fedora at home for the past 2-3 years). The author IMO is a bit too harsh on Ubuntu. On a somewhat related note, I think people should also read this while passing judgement on another OSS (esp bug fixes): http://ryanbigg.com/2010/04/want-it-give/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255905

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seconded - please file bugs atleast. Or help in debugging. A lot of bugs, by a lot of people, are about their particular hardware not working.

Please atleast install debugging symbols/packages and submit better bug reports. Ubuntu developers dont have access to _all_ varieties of hardware.

Yes, delays do happen - but help the developers in helping you.

Better stacktraces, log files, even debugging-enabled-but-slow-Ubuntu helps in fixing issues.

I think the biggest problem here is the barriers that exist to reporting bugs. Often you have to start the program in a terminal for stderr output or look for logfiles, isolate relevant error messages and figure out what hardware or software components are relevant, then track down the developer's bugtracker, register to their platform, maybe wait a day for the registration to be processed, and then open a ticket consistent with their conventions, and hope your problem is something they actually care about.

That's a lot of work for users who only see something no longer working after an upgrade. It's tolerable for people who expect to be doing QA in exchange for getting to use cutting edge releases, but if your users aren't programmers, which is the case with ubuntu, they'll just cuss and delete.

Thank goodness I have more than one computer so I can report bugs on my working one while trying to keep the Linux box running.

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