[Linuxcommand-announce] [LinuxCommand.org: Tips, News And Rants] The Bugs In Ubuntu 10.04

[William S. <bs...@pa...>]

Now that Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") has been released, I can spend
some time talking about my experience testing it.

I was really hoping that 10.04, being a LTS (Long Term Support)
release, would have focused on supreme reliability and stability. A
sort of "9.10 without the bugs." Unfortunately this was not the case.
10.04 introduces a host of new features and technologies, some of which
are still rather "green."

In the comments to follow, I was to vent some of my frustrations over
the quality of the 10.04 release. I don't want to disparage the work of
the people in the Ubuntu community nor the staff at Canonical. I'm sure
they worked very hard getting this version out. Many of the problems
are rooted in the upstream projects from which Ubuntu is derived.

A Pet Peeve

If you go to the bug tracking site for Ubuntu, the first thing you see
is a long list of open "Critical" bugs. Looking at the list you notice
that some of these bugs are very old. Discounting the symbolic bug
number 1, the "We don't have as much market share as Microsoft" bug,
you see that some of these open, critical bugs are years old.

Now, I used to administer a bug database (albeit a much smaller one
than the one at Ubuntu), and to my eye this just looks terrible. It
leaves a bad impression. If the bug is really "Critical," then it
should get addressed either by marking it no longer relevant due to its
age, or it should get fixed.

Overt Cosmetic Problems

While a lot of attention was given to the look of Ubuntu 10.04, serious
cosmetic problems appear on many machines. Neither of my test systems
could take full advantage of the visual "improvements" during boot up.
There are a lot of distracting flashes and, on my laptop, it displays
the image you see at the top of this post.

Not very impressive.

O.K. so maybe I have weird hardware of something, but how do you
explain this: click on the help icon on the top panel and wait for
Ubuntu Help Center to come up. Select "Advanced Topics" from the topics
list then "Terminal Commands References [sic]" and look at the result:


Nice.

Connectivity Issues

I'm sure that the folks at Canonical are very interested in corporate
adoption of their product. This means, of course that it has got to
play well with Windows file shares. Unfortunately, here too, 10.04
falls down. Throughout the beta test phase there were numerous problems
with gvfs and gnome-keyring. As it stands now, many of these of these
problems have been worked out, but as of today, you still cannot mount
a password protected Windows share if you store the password. It seems
to work at first, but if you reboot your machine and try it again you
get something like this:


X Problems Galore

While I encountered some important problems with my desktop test
system, they were nothing compared to the problems I have with my
laptop.

A few words about my laptop. Yeah it's old. It's an IBM ThinkPad T41
circa 2004. I bought it from EmperorLinux pre-installed with Fedora
Core 1. Since then, I have run numerous Linux distributions on it
without problems. In fact, the T41 was a favorite of Linux users since
it ran Linux so easily. This is, until 10.04.

Various things will just crash the X server, such as using the NoScript
Firefox extension, or the remote desktop viewer. Suspend and resume
don't work (the display never comes back). You can work around these
problems if you add the kernel parameter nomodeset to grub, but then
all of your videos in totem look like this:


Not exactly what I had in mind.

A Release Too Far?

I am still looking forward to upgrading to 10.04. I'm hopeful that, in
time, the issues I have with 10.04 will be addressed. But what about in
the meantime, with thousands of possibly new users trying out the live
CD only to find issues like the ones I found? That's not good.

Admittedly, I got spoiled by 8.04. It has served me very well for the
last two years. It got me through the production of my book without
crashing once and frankly I'm willing to wait a few seconds more for my
system to boot and willing to give up a lot of CPU-sucking,
memory-hogging eye candy to have a system that stays up and can do the
basic things right.

Further Reading

- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/564471
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yelp/+bug/565893
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libgnome-keyring/+bug/560588
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/561841
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/557224






--
Posted By William Shotts to LinuxCommand.org: Tips, News And Rants at
4/30/2010 03:07:00 PM