I Have Never Seen Ubuntu Get Updates Right | Hacker News Reader

I Have Never Seen Ubuntu Get Updates Right

teddziuba.com

11 pointstwampss10 comments

I figured out how to get my wireless connection back, but the NVidia drivers are still a mystery. I don't care about free software idealism, I care that my shit works.

Are we not seeing the connection here? This is why anyone bothers to write drivers for devices that already have binary-only drivers. It may work right now, but if something changes in the future, someone needs the source code to fix it. Free software is pragmatic in the long run.

(Disclaimer: I spent way too much time a little while ago getting some random binary executables from the Linux 2.0 days -- dynamically linked, 32-bit -- to run on a fresh Ubuntu 8.4.1 installation. The source code had been lost.)

I would be willing to bet that you'll also never see Ted trying out the betas and giving back some useful feedback other than "OMG! FAIL!!!".

To be fair, the Ubuntu quality assurance process seems somewhat shoddy. On stable releases, I've seen 2 rather serious issues with minor updates.

In one update, Ubuntu pretty much broke the PCI detection code in X, so that X always thought that there were no cards. Luckily, it was only a matter of waiting several hours for a fix, and updating from a text console.

In another update, the Canadian english localization completely broke KDE, making it segfault on startup. Again, wait a day or two and update from a text console.

Right now I'm on vanilla Debian (unstable branch) and I find that it has had less critical breakage than Ubuntu's mainline branch. I'm not sure how Ubuntu should update their QA process, though.

Sure, there are some issues with it - I think a 6 month release cycle is difficult. I tend to wait a few weeks before grabbing Ubuntu updates for that reason.

But Ted's attitude is lame - open source software doesn't really need poisonous people like that.

Yep, Ted is a bad writer with very few points to make, so he fills in the gaps with anger and poison. Some people can pull off the angry rant in a a worthwhile way. He can't, and I generally despise his writing.

As far as Ubuntu's update process, these updates were small point updates in the middle of the release cycle, which is why they were so disturbing; it seems that Debian's "constantly up-to-date" system works better for me, at least so far.

Envy was painless for me (if you need to get an nVidia card working): http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html

Maybe I just have had good luck with it, but I have never had problems like this with any version of Ubuntu since 6.04, but I'm also not running intrepid yet.

I have. Up until this last summer, when I got a new computer, I'd either have problems with my video drivers or with my sound card. It was an absolute pain.

And, according to his update, he could've found the answer and saved up some of the hot air in his colon by Googling.

driver update don't do shit either in VISTA

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