Medium severity sounds right for a bug that only affects users with certain hardware. High severity should be reserved for things with a wider impact, or else it loses its meaning.
I know OSS needs to be more attentive to aesthetics, but let's not forget that "Ew, I just can't STAND these fonts" is a different kind of unusable from "I tried six obscure workarounds listed in a bug report, but none worked, so I installed a different OS." Using a laptop exclusively as one's primary computer is extremely common these days. If showstopper bugs are tolerated on laptops, the perception of Linux viability for non-tinkerers is going to regress back to five or ten years ago when it was common to encounter bugs like this in a desktop install.
Touché.
It may be that as they improve wireless support by including more drivers and making it easier to use proprietary ones, they're making the suspend/resume problem harder and harder.
I've fixed several problems like this on a per-machine basis, but the fixes are specific to each piece of hardware (read: "this obviously would break something for someone else if included in the distro").
Why this bug is particularly significant is that the bug affects people with across very different hardware configurations, manufacturer and model.
Still, I grant that I do not know how does one figure out the issues with wider impact: but this particular one has 77 people marked on the "affects me" list. That is not an insignificant number (not the total number of people affected, but rather who bothered to search the tracker and then file a bug)
I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu.
Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra configuration required.
Not only that, but I also got an external 3G modem from Vodafone, that also worked out of the box.
As I've said before ... there are plenty of configurations that are running just fine with Ubuntu, but if you're going to shop at random of course you're going to have problems. Heck ... my external 3G modem wasn't compatible with Vista out of the box, you had to search for an updated driver on the Internet.
P.S. To make this more specific, I've been thinking about buying a refurbished Thinkpad, and one of the commenters on the bug says suspend/resume stopped working on his T61p in Lucid and remains broken in Maverick.
I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling (laptop) hardware and maintaining a GNU/Linux distro that's guaranteed to work on it. Surely there's a buck or two to made?
ZaReason and System76 are two vendors that sell laptops with Ubuntu. I don't know if they actively support Ubuntu upgrades for their hardware (in the sense of testing/fixing bugs).
Not always right out of the box -- I had to research workarounds for video-related problems a few years ago.
Not always without problems -- on two occasions a wifi driver bug prevented the suspend from going through and my laptop spent a few hot hours in the backpack. (The Thinkpad survived that splendidly with no problems.)
Things are getting better all the time. Not monotonically -- there are regressions every now and then -- but in general more and more things work for more and more people.
If this were my project, I wouldn't be releasing it in this state. I know it's the 10/10 release and presumably 10/10/10 they will hit -- 42 and all that -- but they really need to get some stability into this thing. It's starting to alienate folk.
By raising bugs and doing the legwork I've helped fix quite a few, but two unresolved issues, both involving hardware that worked flawlessly until now, are making me wonder how well my time is being spent.
In addition, Shuttleworth is clearly starting down the road of monetizing Ubuntu, and if I'm going to support that then I want my show-stoppers fixed. Quid pro quo.
Because of this, moving to the Dark Side is looking more and more attractive. I wish it wasn't so.
[Edit: I also have an old Acer on 9.10 that works flawlessly, including the hardware that causes issues in 10.10. I won't be updating it.]