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Comment by hippee-lee | Hacker News Reader

The driver for my wired Ethernet card is not included. I hoped it would be when I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 but there it was, finished upgrading and no wired connection. Since it is a work development box, where I am usually in the middle of a sprint, I will put off all future upgrades as long as possible.

Without a strong guarantee that my system will work exactly like it does before the upgrade I have no incentive to up grade ever again as long as I can get my stories done by the end of the sprint.

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I don't think this is comparable. If you buy an iPad, you're getting hardware that is certified (and more) to run iOS. If you want it to compare this with Ubuntu, at least use a machine that is certified to run Ubuntu.

Alternatively, go ahead and complain that Ubuntu doesn't work well for you on non-certified hardware. But please don't conflate this with upgrade deficiencies.

This is a work computer, I don't have a choice.

All I know is that for the last six months, whenever I up grade my ubuntu box I spend anywhere from an hour to a day getting it back into the state it was so I can use and work with my code base - be it the wired driver, the over writing of java, or changes to the php.ini and on and on ..

I guess what you are saying is that I should reinstall windows and install the development tools I need on there? I should tell my (start up employer with a limited budget) that we need Ubuntu certified machines for all developers?

I'm not the only one win this problem - honestly you comment is the first time I have heard of an Ubuntu certified box. However I do know that other developers who have experienced similar issues take the same approach - I know of one person who is on 10.11 still. Not because he doesn't want an Ubuntu certified box or because he doesn't want to up grade but because he has work to do and upgrading gets in the way of that.

Why not go the other way, only install Ubuntu on certified hardware, keep me from using it on my hardware unless they can support it.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that if you want to run a Linux computer with a seamless experience you need to do a bit of research on hardware in advance, at least this problem is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

You could argue that you would have the same problem with OS X, it's just made easier for you because they designed the OS not to run at all on anything that wasn't 100% compatible. Running Ubuntu on random hardware is really more like running a hackintosh.

Now you could argue about who's "fault" this is. Canonical's for not making clearer which hardware is supported or pushing for better support, Yours for not doing the research or the hardware manufacturers for not providing better drivers out of the box but it is basically academic.

I actually remember an interview with Linus somewhere where somebody asked him "why is Linux not more popular on the desktop?" and his response was that the desktop is hardest because you have to try and support every printer that somebody might happen to plugin.

FWIW Lenovo and System76 computers seem to be the ones that people have best results with for running Ubuntu.

You make good points. My choice not to upgrade is more pragmatic than anything else ... Work to do and so many hours to do it in. And I agree, knowing about the certification makes it more like running hackintosh - one dev does that here and he has had several issues with Xcode that I do not on my mpb.

I also learned Linux on the command line mainly interacting with the typical LAMP app running on AWS. They were mainly Red arhat or CentoS and I never had to interact with a Linux desktop until about six months ago and I guess I just assumed that it was 2012 - surely the desktop/upgrade issues of the ninety's and aughts.

I don't think it is anyone's 'fault' it is just a difficult problem to solve. Knowing that there are Ubuntu certified desktops out there is useful info I can pass along to my boss before they buy an new device box.

I haven't even found that to be the case. I have several ARM boxes including Raspberry Pi, several desktops, a few Macbooks, etc, and have yet to have to build a driver from source. Worst thing I've had to do is go wired to install Broadcom stuff in Fedora because it didn't do it for me.

No offense but if you had built in and then did an in-place upgrade to a newer kernel, etc, I would not be surprised that things break.

These days, I'm as likely to do an in-place upgrade in Linux as I am in Windows. It's far too insanely easy to just have a separate /home partition and do a clean install. Apt makes it easy to restore packages.

You still have to rebuild the wifi module, but it shouldn't be any more work than the first time.

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