Ubuntu 9.04 Beta - Expectations Too High?

Before I even get started, allow me to make the following very clear. I am a full time Ubuntu user. as a matter of fact, as I type this, I am streaming my office and desktop live via Ustream on an Ubuntu min-PC. I also have two notebooks running 8.10 with my Ubuntu desktop PC placed firmly in front of me. Clearly, obviously, I like Ubuntu and the Linux platform in general. This being said, I have yet to have a release of Ubuntu come out that was not bundled with at least one really bad regression that sends me screaming into the forums for a quick fix. Often times, the tweak is easy or unneeded. Other times, it is hardware designed explicitly for Windows.

My most recent example, problems upgrading a notebook using the OpenChrome VIA video driver. For whatever reason, I was being forced to use the alternative CD for installation AND I had to rebuild the Xorg.conf by hand as the ‘improvements” were still buggy as the existing bug reports pointed out at that time.

So you will have to excuse me if I could not give a rat’s butt about cloud computing coming to Ubuntu 9.04. While I agree that this is the next logical progression, I would also point out the single biggest upgrade Ubuntu could give its users is a longer beta period between releases. Once each release has had time to sit out in the sun for a bit, the bugs begin to take care of themselves. But right off the shelf, not so much.

And what about progress on touch screen computing? Yes, this can be done by hand…but who the hell wants to deal with that? For my money, I will hang onto my older releases longer than most as I always have while watching the progress of the new Amazon S3 stuff develop over time.

Hey, who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised this time and we can not have ongoing regressions this time around to be solved later after it is released. But I guess that is part of the fun of using Linux. Just wish I could see longer development periods with this distro though.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]