I’ve been watching the forums for developments about Ubuntu Hardy Heron after my bad experiences trying to upgrade and use it.
Seems the general consensus is that the random freezes are a kernel problem. Unfortunately this same kernel is part of most current or upcoming distros. Debian Lenny, PCLinuxOS and the soon-to-release OpenSuse 11 are all based on kernel 2.6.24. Of the major distros, only Fedora 9 is not using it; and I’m not sure I want to go that route. There was, briefly, a way to switch to 2.6.25.1 in the repos – it involved installing the kernel being used for the next development version, 8.10, due in October. But that is now gone as well. apparently because the development of that version has been switched to kernel 2.6.26.
If you look at what people have written about their switches to Hardy, you see a lot of people who had no problems and love it; and you see a small but significant minority of people who have had this or other problems and are frustrated. The kernel issue is a known bug; it was crashing systems all through beta, but apparently the decision was made to run with it anyway and just let it continue to be a problem, rather than change to another kernel, or delay the release until a stable kernel was available. No fix, some people are going to have broken systems, but what the hell, let’s just push it out there anyway. Maybe it’ll get fixed later. Maybe not.
How very Microsoft.
This shakes my confidence in Ubuntu in particular and Linux desktop distros in general. We are supposed to be aiming at dislodging Microsoft from the desktop; is this the way to do it? By releasing buggy distros that are guaranteed to frustrate users? I’ve been using Linux for years; I know my way around the command line and I am accustomed to solving my own problems. But this one was more work than I wanted to deal with. It geeked me out. Moving to the new kernel before it’s ready might be a fun way to push out bleeding-edge features, but it’s a giant step backward if the goal is better general acceptance of the Linux desktop. It reinforces the idea of Linux as a toy for geeks, not a serious desktop OS that anyone can use and depend on. It was the wrong thing to do.
Who knows if this problem will exist in upcoming versions of the kernel? We’ll see. There will be a maintenance release of Hardy next month, and we’ll see what kernel is in that. In the meantime I’m not installing Hardy on any of my machines, or on those machines I build or support for others.
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