[clue-tech] Ubuntu experiences good and bad

[Collins Richey]

On 10/30/05, Greg Knaddison <greg.knaddison at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/29/05, Kevin Cullis <kevincu at viawest.net> wrote:
> > > 3. The upgrade from 5.04 to 5.10 was a little rocky. The upgrade
> > > seemed to be aok, but when I installed mplayer and its codecs, the
> > > system became unusuable. I had to do some lengthy searches in the
> > > forums offline to find an answer. When I installed the fix, a whole
> > > s###pot of additional packages came on board, which makes me think the
> > > the original upgrade package was incomplete. Now all is well again.
> >
> > As a side note, I always "fresh install" Linux when I move to a new
> > level. I find it saves the hassles of these known issues. On the other
> > hand I don't have many configuration issues to work through because I
> > don't customize it that much.
>
> That's a major turnoff for some (many) people.  It's why a lot of
> folks ditched Fedora for CentOS.  Having an upgrade path that works is
> apparently hard because not many distros provide it or brag about it,
> but if I don't have an upgrade path that works then I want the distro
> to be stable/supported for a few years.
>

Although an upgrade path is provided, its not very well tested, and
even the experts at the Well Known North American Vendor (read: Red
Hat) and CentOS recommend a clean install, They imply that you get to
keep both halves if it breaks. Not that I am in favor of this
approach.

Here would be an opportunity for Linux to shine. Windows upgrades
(almost) always break everything. You'd think the clever developers of
FOSS would have found a better approach, but no, every major software
product starting with the kernel (seems to) firmly believe in changing
the base structure and the APIs from one release to the next such that
upgrades are problematic at best..

I happen to have a highly customized system and thus lot of
"configuration issues," so I'm not really thrilled by the prospect of
breakage every 6 months. I've passed my complaints on to Ubuntu in the
forums. They've done so many good things (bringing Debian out of the
anceint world into at least the most recent past not being the least);
so maybe they can come up with an upgrade procedure that works.

Sigh. How are you going to teach an army of Window refugees to do a
fresh install every 6 months when many of us old hands can barely cope
with it? This (at least) is a perfectly good reason why Linux has not
caught on with the masses.


--
Collins Richey
      Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code ... If you write
      the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not
      smart enough to debug it.
             -Brian Kernighan
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