Trepidation with Lucid
I have been a fan of ubuntu linux since the first time I installed it 4 and a half years ago. I have tried many others over the years and always come back to ubuntu linux. But with the latest release some things have me worried.
For starters, this is the second LTS that has huge oversights or where not enough time was taken. LTS suggests a machine that is out of the box stable, and that will remain so for at least the two year cycle to the next LTS if not until the 3 years of support is up. With the 8.04 Hardy Heron release there was beta software included, the reason behind this that it would allow greater function in the future. But that isn’t what an LTS is about, it is about a stable machine out of the box, not when the box gets updated software in one to two months.
With this latest LTS there is once again things that made me think that the designation Long Term Support is something that just comes along every two years and has nothing to do with the actual stability of the system at hand. I had a friend that went to upgrade and now can not get his system up and running. The graphics drivers have completely gone baserk. He has ATI graphics in his laptop and according to this bug report ATI graphics just don’t work with Lucid right now. The explanation being that ATI is closed Blah Blah Blah, and ATI hasn’t put out a kernel module compatible with the kernel we used blah blah blah.
Bullshit. Complete and utter rubbish. What about the open source radeon driver? Why wasn’t that developed so that people could actually view what the system has to display? Or better yet, get off the pride wagon and delay the release until it is something that could truly be called LTS. What? You couldn’t do that, it would be absurd? Dapper Drake was released two months late so that it could be polished. That delay was something that impressed me about ubuntu in the first place.
I am beginning to think that I should part ways with ubuntu. It will be a bitter day when I pull the trigger and move on to another distro. Until then I sit here using the last edition of ubuntu which I finally got tuned in to the point that I need. I would consider updating sooner but I need to work on projects using the computer, not work on the computer.
Of all the distros that I have tried I like the debian base over the ‘traditional’ rpm based distros. I am seriously considering trying out Debian Sid. Or at the least Debian Lenny. Any suggestions of other debian based distros to try I am open to and I would appreciate you passing them on.
May 22nd, 2010 at 9:15 am
There is a lot of factors when picking a new distribution. More of a CLI or GUI based. You say you want Debian based. Debian Squeze should be released sometime in June or July. I would recommend trying out Debian “Testing” pretty stable but also has pretty new software. I am not sure how you feel about KDE or XFCE desktop environments. There is a distribution called sidux. Only has KDE or XFCE based environments. Very fast and a few days after something gets released sidux will have it. It’s also a rolling release.
Arch Linux is unique not based on anything. A lot of people have converted to it from other distributions. Also a rolling release and will have the latest software as well. Some people say that Pacman is better than apt-get in Debian or Ubuntu. It won’t hold your hand though and you have a system that is bare bones and you have to pick what you want. Also you can compile from source if you want to.
If you want something rock solid stable then try Slackware. According to distrowatch.com they will soon release Slackware 13.1. It won’t have the latest software but it will be very fast and you also will pick what you like. From reading the Arch Linux forums though a lot of people have jumped from Slackware to Arch.
Why no love for RPM based distros?
It all boils down to personal taste and what works for you. To each his own.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:02 am
[...] while back I wrote about my trepidation with Lucid. I have used ubuntu linux ever since my first linux introduction 5 years ago. But recently the [...]