Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

.... it's obviously not stupid to try the update, either. But denying that there are problems - THAT maybe considered as stupid, since problems actually are to be expected
There should, btw, be an easy way to turn off the naggers. Also, btw, I thought that 11.04 was supposed to be an LTS - that doesn't seem to be correct.

Don't confuse denying a rant with denying that problems exist. Blanket claims are always wrong. Kubuntu won't work on ALL machines, nor will it fail on ALL machines. It's a question of percentages. Will it work on 95% of all machines? My guess is that at the minimum it will work on 98 out of 100 machines. IF there are 100 million users of Kubuntu then there are 2 million Kubuntu users who are disappointed. Since most disappointed users come to either the Ubuntu or Kubuntu forums having even a small percentage of 2 million users come with problems may leave the impression that "everyone" is having problems and Kubuntu doesn't work at all. (Disclaimer: obviously I don't know how many people are actually using or trying to use Kubuntu. The numbers are merely figurative.)

Kubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 was the last LTS. Add three years and you'll get Kubuntu 13.4 as the next LTS. I have been running 10.4 since it was alpha. I will switch to 13..4 when it goes alpha. Meanwhile, the others hold brief appearances as a guest OS so I can familiarize myself with them.

[el_koraco]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

Three computer generations ago (circa 2000 and before) the meaning of "release early, release often" was well known mantra among members of the Linux community. In a quid quo pro for free software community members gladly accepted early release software, knowing that for some of them the earlier the version number the more likely it would break their system, and they did their part by posting bug reports.

Agreed, with this and the rest of the stuff you wrote, but some people just don't have the stomach to troubleshoot and fix things that aren't working for them. I would stop short of calling them stupid for upgrading when the notification comes. It's more like they don't know what they're getting into. I the whole *ubuntu community it has kinda become customary to rant on about Canonical for everything that goes wrong, when they're mostly just following the basic tenants of OSS development (granted, Canonical does label *buntu releases as "stable", but so does the fedora project ).

If you're using a newer version of Linux, you're a beta tester. If you can't stomach that, you either shouldn't be using Linux, or you should be using older versions (i.e. versions with older, but more reliable software). For *buntu, there's LTS, for the Debian world, there's Squeeze, for RPM, there's Scientific Linux. All rock solid distros, all well supported.

@ gjartin
KpackageKit (USC), Software origins, Updates, in the "notify about releases" choose never, or only Long Term Support.

[el_koraco]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

Kubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 was the last LTS. Add three years and you'll get Kubuntu 13.4 as the next LTS. I have been running 10.4 since it was alpha. I will switch to 13..4 when it goes alpha. Meanwhile, the others hold brief appearances as a guest OS so I can familiarize myself with them.

12.04 will be the next LTS, you won't have to wait that long

[woodsmoke]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

GG your summary was a very good one, I watched some of what you outlined from the periphery.

woodsmoke

[ardvark71]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

So, as a retired software developer I want to thank everyone who has become part of the Linux community and contributed to its ongoing existence and welfare by contributing bug reports to the appropriate websites. (If you think you've found a bug and don't know where to report it ask here!), and encouragement to those who have experienced problems, for what ever reason.

Your welcome, and thank you for your willingness to offer your expertise and experience as well.

Regards...

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

.....
If you're using a newer version of Linux, you're a beta tester.
...

Since all of Linux and its software is GPL and under constant development, and the "beta testers" are not hired employees but the users of Linux and its applications, ALL of Linux is "beta" software. Even LTS versions, although there may be less "testing" on them than interim releases.

However, exactly the same thing can be said about Win7 and Mac!

IF this were not the case there wouldn't be automatic updates by any of them. It's that when the software passes through PAID professional testers you'd expect the software to be better. That it isn't always so should tell you something.

And, el_koraco , thanks for catching that 12.04 LTS typo!

[el_koraco]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

I didn't say being a beta tester is bad. It's like when people say Linux is chaotic. It's something to be proud about. You're beta testing a mish-mash of free software, so millions of people can benefit from the bugs you happen to catch and help straighten out.

[wizard10000]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

...Neither my bil or me is a young, energetic, coder with 36 extra hours a day - I'm 62, he's 54 - we're just computer users who loved 10.10 since it was so good. 11.04 isn't that good - for us, and obviously, for several others.

I left Natty but chose Debian Stable, as some of the binaries are newer than Maverick but not nearly as bleeding edge as Debian Testing.

I had a couple of things that didn't work in Natty - one was emerald, and fortunately one of the folks here created a kwin theme called smaragd that allowed me to run my favorite emerald theme but emerald doesn't care for the version of compiz that shipped with Natty and I don't see that getting any better unless some other developers take an interest.

Switching distros didn't solve this problem as emerald isn't available in Debian at all (at least not in stable or testing) so, like it or not I'm gonna have to find a new theme

The bigger problem for me was devede, which sorta works in Natty but works not at all in Debian Testing (Wheezy). The problem in Natty was that dvdauthor now requires an environment variable that devede doesn't supply (the developer's been aware for four months now and hasn't fixed his binaries - which actually looks like about 15 minutes' work).

The problem in Wheezy is significantly worse. Unless your video has AC3 audio, sound in devede is pretty severely broken. You can work around the problem by using avidemux to recode the audio in your file before you run devede but that's a bit more work than I'd like to put into things, especially considering you *still* have to add the environment variable that first showed up as a problem in Natty.

My solution was to slide over to Debian for the time being because as I mentioned some of the binaries were newer but not so new as to be broken. I haven't turned my back on Kubuntu - mainly because this forum is so great and I'm kinda thinking about going back to Maverick myself. Then I can have emerald *and* an unbroken devede

One thing that's broken in Squeeze and later is ftp - or anyway, the version of pure-ftpd on my leased VPS doesn't like the version of ftp that's in Squeeze and later - it refuses to do mget, and I need that function as I have a cron job that pulls down a daily database backup from the VPS. That's broken in Debian but works fine in Natty and earlier.

One thing I did learn in this go-around with Debian is how to assign priority to repositories, so that I can have stable, testing, unstable and backports repos available but not goober up my system with bleeding-edge packages unless I force the system to do so

Anyway, I think where I'm gonna end up is with Natty - once I figure out how to export that pesky dvdauthor environment variable as everything else works including emerald.

I like Debian just fine, but I've gotten too used to the pointy-clicky installing non-free drivers thing, and compiling drivers for my netbook's wireless card and my desktop PC's video card didn't do a whole lot for me.

I think Canonical needs to quit tying releases to dates and start releasing when things are ready, but that's one of the prices you get to pay for running on the bleeding edge. I also think Canonical needs to freeze their feature set earlier and spend more time testing

But - I've rambled a bit. I was a little disappointed with Natty as well, but with one exception it works better for me than just about anything else - and the one exception really isn't a showstopper.

Also, for me, the community is about as important as the distribution and this is a nice place to hang out

[gjartin]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

@ gjartin
KpackageKit (USC), Software origins, Updates, in the "notify about releases" choose never, or only Long Term Support.

Wow - a person who actually READS, and, on top of that actually answers a question! I'm forever in your debt, my dear el_koraco

[gjartin]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

Just for the record: I've been using Linux of various kinds for more than 10 years. For the last 6-7 years Linux only. Until a few months ago, I ran Mandrake - Mandriva, until Mandriva went haywire for real. Kubuntu 10.10 saved my sanity

At the moment we have 3 computers at home - I have 2, my wife 1. Only Kubuntu, no Windows or Mac in our house. I know the importance of filing bugs, and I've done so a number of times (although not during the last year or so).

But I also know that there comes a time when it's no longer worth the trouble to spend all my time with the computer, trying to install a new OS, when the old one worked better. Had there been an easy solution for the network problem (which has been discussed repeatedly in other forums), I probably would have gone that way - but there wasn't.

It may well be that only 6 out of 300 computers won't work with 11.04. But that's not much comfort, when all 6 are within my family...

Btw, Greygeek - I think you're using Microsoft as a bit of a strawman in your argumentation. The problems with FOSS are older than that (even though, of course, they have been accentuated since FOSS has become much more important).

The part about the "compatibility window" was very good, though!

[el_koraco]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

I like Debian just fine, but I've gotten too used to the pointy-clicky installing non-free drivers thing, and compiling drivers for my netbook's wireless card and my desktop PC's video card didn't do a whole lot for me.

Dunno about the wireless card, but my experience with the Ubuntu family and my GPU has been... interesting, to say the least. I've tried to use jockey for my Mobility Radeon card, but ended up not too happy. First of all, *buntu ships with a version of Catalyst that ATI publishes for the latest version of X just before a next release. When you install, it's usually not the stablest thing in the world. By the time things get cleared up, ATI has published two new versions of the GPU, which both work much better, only jockey doesn't get updated (there are plans to change this), so you're stuck with an inferior driver. Everybody's experience has been that it's much better to go with the ATI variant, which is really easy to install (it even has a GUI now), but the downside is that you need to uninstall it on every kernel upgrade and reinstall it later. You can lock the kernel, but that's not advisable to do early in the release process. I do know that you can build the driver so that it isn't affected by the kernel upgrades in Fedora, haven't seen it for *buntu.

So the best that I've come up with has been to go back to Maverick after the Natty release, get the latest driver from ATI, install it, and lock the kernel, which hasn't been changed in a while, and is on patch 28 or sth, so working very good. I finally have a priprietary driver that works as well as the open source one, and does the acpi temperature management right.

I suspect it's different with Nvidia, but I have seen people having problems with those cards in Natty as well. Once again, it's a price of going on the bleeding edge. Canonical ain't gonna change the release model, because they need as many people as possible to run the latest releases so they can fix the worst bugs before the LTS releases. Which is fine, but they would need to find a way to address the issues with some basic things, like the drivers. openSUSE has Nvidia and ATI repos, which constantly get updated with the latest versions of the drivers. You can install them via Yast, with mind-numbing ease, and the whole KMS thing gets preserved.

of course, all the Kubuntu users can be happy that they're running KDE at the moment, because the rewrite of Compiz has been making for some general mayhem on the GUnity side

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

...
until Mandriva went haywire for real
....

I used Mandriva 2009 PP on this notebook from September of 2008 till February of 2009, when I moved to Kubuntu 9.04 Alpha.

What happened to Mandriva?

[gjartin]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

...
until Mandriva went haywire for real
....

I used Mandriva 2009 PP on this notebook from September of 2008 till February of 2009, when I moved to Kubuntu 9.04 Alpha.

What happened to Mandriva?

You probably know that Mandriva's had financial problems for several years. During the last couple of years, there's been one reduction after the other, when key people, like Adam Williamson, were let go.
Adam was lucky enough to find a new job (with Fedora) almost immediately, but other people who were very important to the community weren't so lucky.

Earlier this year, the crap really hit the fan. A lot of people in development were fired, along with the rest of the community people. The money was instead to come from some Russian developer...
So basically everyone still in development decided to leave, before getting fired. Most old-time users (and subscribers, like myself) changed to other distros - most, I think, to Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

The staff that had been let go (or had left on their own accord) started a "fork" called Mageia. Sadly, I don't think there's much hope for it. The only result so far is a beta, which basically is the same as Mandriva 2010.1.
I don't know what has happened to Mandriva as such, since I dropped it. It's all very sad, though.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

I hadn't heard about the Russian connection, but I was using Mandriva when Adam was let go, along with some of the others.

There is a lesson in this for Canonical. Mandriva's financial problems began when its board hired an individual as the CEO who had NO Linux, GPL or Free Software knowledge or experience at all. His brain was hardwired into the proprietary model and he pushed Mandriva into an Education desktop. In doing so he burned through, IIRC, $5M US, (or was it $7M ?) in one year, like it was water. Anyway, it took Mandriva several years to pay that debt off and come out of receivership, but as a viable commercial distro it never really recaptured the ground it had gained as Mandrake, or built using the club memberships. I paid for a club membership so I could access the private servers. The public ones were always slow. When the private servers slowed down I began ordering the DVD PowerPacks. But, alas, there were not enough Adams around and the quality began to slip, as you've noted. I was planning to move to another distro when they let Adam go, and began looking around when I tried Kubuntu 9.04 Alpha.

I think Mandriva's days are numbered. Unfortunately, the bad economic times is going to make it rough for some other distros too. A good Linux desktop is just too much for one developer to build and maintain alone and without much financial or hardware support. So, I suspect, we will be seeing a coalescing of distros into a few major releases: Debian, Ubuntu (Kubuntu), Fedora and CentOS (RH), SuSE (If it does well for Attachmate), Slackware, and probably FreeBSD. There are over 4,000 Linux and BSD distros. Most below the top 100 on DistroWatch's PHR counter are unknown even to most die heard Linux fans. And, PHRs are easily gamed and mean very little with regards to actual popularity. When I was using PCLinuxOS between the P.92 release and the final 2007 release there was a period of over 12 months when PCLOS held the #1 spot on the PHR list, yet aside from myself and the folks at the PCLOS forum, I never met anyone who heard of it.

It makes me wonder ... what distro would folks turn to if their favorite one went under? I think I'll set up a poll.

[gjartin]

Re: Kubuntu 11.04 sucks

Mandriva's financial problems began when its board hired an individual as the CEO who had NO Linux, GPL or Free Software knowledge or experience at all.Mandriva's financial problems began when its board hired an individual as the CEO who had NO Linux, GPL or Free Software knowledge or experience at all.

Amen to that! Irc their problems began some time before; the beancounter was actually a way to "solve" the problem, but, as you say, he didn't know anything at all about what he was supposed to do.

I paid for a club membership so I could access the private servers. The public ones were always slow. When the private servers slowed down I began ordering the DVD PowerPacks. But, alas, there were not enough Adams around and the quality began to slip, as you've noted. I was planning to move to another distro when they let Adam go,

Again, you're spot on. I was a paying member (silver, i.e. Powerpack) for several years - for the the last couple of years, I saw everything crumble, but I kept on paying because I still had hope.

I think Mandriva's days are numbered. Unfortunately, the bad economic times is going to make it rough for some other distros too.[...] yet aside from myself and the folks at the PCLOS forum, I never met anyone who heard of it.

I've tried PCLOS several times - always very slick and good looking, but there was no support for my language, and only a few users here in Sweden except for me.
Re "rough times for other distros too": I think this also may be a sign of a mature market - many well known distros are actually kept alive by a rather small group of indivduals, and the software is getting more complicated from day to day.
Maybe it's not only a bad thing for the hobbyist?

It makes me wonder ... what distro would folks turn to if their favorite one went under? I think I'll set up a poll.

Very interesting idea! It could show, for example, what the most important factors are: Kde support, "bleeding edge", rpm/deb base, etc. (I found Kubuntu a bit scary because I had to leave rpm).