> Joe Auty wrote:
> > I realize that every OS has its strengths and weaknesses,
> Stability would be Ubuntu's kryptonite in this case. It's the yellow to
> Ubuntu's Green Lantern.
If they can't maintain stability they'll start seeing folks jump the
boat. The Linux distro space is vast, and nobody wants core features to
be broken.
It's not like Microsoft where switching to a new OS means walking
away from a potentially massive cash investment. (Or when moving from
Microsoft to Apple and you're walking away from one cash investment
to another... Though when it comes to Microsoft they have a habit of
requiring new cash investments so -- depending on what you do -- you're
always going from one massive cash investment to another.)
> > Again, I know that my problems here are pretty vague and sketchy...
> >
> > My main point is more of a question. Why doesn't the Ubuntu team put a
> > hold on adding new features and just work their butts off getting the
> > mundane unsexy stuff to work, and in improving performance overall?
> >
> Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
> nobody wants to do maintenance. -- Kurt Vonnegut
>
> New features are sexy. Fixing bugs means admitting you were wrong. To
> keep gaining mindshare, Ubuntu needs to keep adding the sexy and never
> look back. It's great that they've come this far, but I really don't
> like to get onboard with fast-growing projects because of situations
> like this.
This is particularly a problem with the GNOME stuff. The GNOME folks
create a server/library, bring it up to 0.9x -- never getting to 1.0 --
and then create a new server/library partially basing it off the earlier
code, but dropping all the bugs. (Yes, you read that right, as they're
keeping *some* of the code, *some* of the earlier bugs remain.)
Personally I wish I could get all my ALSA applications sending their
audio to Phonon, KDE 4's sound server, as it is -- by far -- better
than that PulseAudio crap. (It is easy to configure it so that when
I plug in USB headphones the running audio switches automatically to
the headphones.) As it is, there's an ALSA driver to send the audio to
PulseAudio but not one to do the same thing with Phonon. (By the way,
that may well clear up some of your audio issues -- though if it is
blocking the application it is probably using OSS, and you may need the
alsa-oss package to turn the OSS calls in to ALSA calls.)
PulseAudio has no concept of priorities for backends. You can configure
it for the USB headphones, but if you then unplug the headphones you get
no audio at all until you reconfigure by hand.
> If you still want to use a bleeding-edge distro, I hear good things
> about Arch. That said, I've been a happy Debian user since 2004.
In truth, Debian's biggest failure was their slow release cycle. If you
actually wanted to stick with "stable", you could be way behind the
times. They've changed their release cycle, though, so that should no
longer be an issue.
If Ubuntu stops being stable for me, I've no reason not to switch to
Debian.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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