Re: [BLUG] My Ubuntu/Linux bitch

Mark Krenz wrote:

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 06:12:57PM GMT, Joe Auty [joe@netmusician.org] said the following:   

Yes, but you are an uber geek :)     

   Thank you, but no.  I'm only a geek in the respect that I do a lot of computer stuff.  I'm not a "kernel developer" level geek that eats and breathes binary.  I enjoy assembling a computer, but I don't really care about writing drivers and delving into the deep level modules, drivers and heavy stuff.  My goal is to do stuff with my computer, not do stuff for it.    I think some people think that I do something special when I setup my computer to get it working, but not really.  Seriously, my installation of Ubuntu or whatever other distribution is pretty standard and I haven't done anything special to get sound, video or networking working. It just works.    There is one thing that I do do[1] though and that's make sure that I buy hardware that is compatible with Linux.  Mac has the same issue where people think they can just go out and buy any piece of hardware they want and it should work, but it doesn't because.  Mac is a bit better because some stores have Mac specific sections for hardware.     

Which is what makes my problems particularly disappointing, as we're talking about my ethernet controller built into my motherboard and USB audio, both of which were working flawlessly in Jaunty. My real gripe here is the regression.

ourselves, but for the masses. Linux is very far away from being consumable by the masses, at least using Ubuntu as a metric... See monitor management, getting sound to work, video, etc.. Then, you have the whole category of usability which is a little hit and miss, in my opinion.     

  In the long term, Ubuntu has been a big step forward in getting hardware working.  I have had much better luck on Ubuntu than on any other distribution.  Although it could just be a coincidence and some hardware that I had suddenly had kernel drivers. Nevertheless, prior to Ubuntu, I had these hardware problems that had to be resolved by doing something special.    o HP laserjet printers and some printers in general didn't work.   o Nvidia and ATI cards both required doing a lot of extra stuff on the      command line to get the commercial driver installed.   o Wireless configuration on a laptop was much more difficult.    o Installing Flash and Java installed and working with your browser   o Better GUI tools for system management.   At least this is the way I saw things happen.    

I'm in the same boat in terms of my Nvidia driver, and I obtained an Nvidia video card because I knew it would work better in Linux than an ATI one. I can't complain about problems in this category over the last few releases of Ubuntu though.

Consider yourself lucky. I'm struggling with kernel errors such as "NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 (via-rhine): transmit queue 0 timed out" that render my ethernet useless, and "Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -285503362 ns)", neither of which Grandma has a fighting chance of figuring out.  Both of these are new to Ubuntu 9.10 for me, so I don't necessarily fault Linux as a whole for this     

   All OSes usually have problems when a new version is released, sometimes they are major. I almost never upgrade right away. This is the first time I've seen this specific problem, but its most likely a problem with the via-rhine driver.    

There are threads about this problem in 2007. It seems either this is a brand new problem that is generating the same error message, or a regression of the old one. Either way, it's not a good sign of Ubuntu QA these days. I'm far from the only one who has had problems with 9.10, there was a whole Slashdot article about the bumpy upgrade. Like I said, I've never *ever* seen this problem until 9.10, and I'm not the only one getting it now. The clocksource stuff seems to come and go between releases, there are a gazillion threads about that. It seems to lead to crashing. There are several people whose shared printing stopped working with this release too. There are a whole host of issues with 9.10. It would seem that 9.10 has been the least impressive release to date, at least based on my perceptions and personal experiences.

I'm not bitching too aggressively looking for sympathy because I could have held off upgrading, but on the other hand, it looks to me like 9.10 was not release worthy. This step forward/step back approach to improvements is very frustrating.

 And I think you don't give Grandma and Grandpa enough credit. They defeated Hitler and the Communists and they can't use KDE or Gnome? Come on, give me a break. People have become too lazy.    

Not with these sorts of problems, no. Grandma and Grandpa might be able to use KDE or Gnome if everything was setup for them already and working beautifully and they learned things by rote, but troubleshooting these sorts of problems? No chance in hell...They'll probably have to live with some minor annoyances as well. Understanding the GUI? It depends on what they do with their computers, I guess.


Just my two cents...

--
Joe Auty
NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
http://www.netmusician.org
joe@netmusician.org