The 10.04 release of Ubuntu was supposed to be a stable and useful release which we could depend upon for 3 years, or at least 2 years until we get the next LTS release.
This Christmas I’m visiting a bunch of in-law family up in Vermont and a friend of a family member happened to be visiting and was interested in this Linux thing. He said he’s tried it last year and it failed to work well because of the broadcom wireless driver issues. This year he’s had the proof of Linux’s shittness thoughrally reinforced by the complete failure of Ubuntu’s 10.04 release to work from the CD in any way.
Black screen of death. After the CD boots and there is a stopping of activity there is then nothing. No input, no output, the cd can be ejected (even though it shouldn’t be) I suspect the issue is because of the intel graphic cards which I also had to deal with on another machine where I had to force the upgrade of the kernel to 2.6.35 (maverick) to stop it crashing horribly with the white bars of death.
This is horrible! I now know of no machine that didn’t require some new kernel to work. My own laptop doesn’t work with Maverick at all and needs to use the lucid kernel in order to function. (pci memory is unaddressable) and the makers of the computer (system76) and been unable to replicate the issue in any material way despite it being reported by several users.
I’m depressed this Christmas about the progress or lack of progress, or regression of basic functionality in Ubuntu. Why are we spending so much time and money on usability when so much more money needs to be spent on testings, qa, automation and fixing of bugs as a priority?
The number of printers that don’t work, the number of scanners that do work at all, the failure of wacom and wizardpen tablets and the terrible support for all sorts of hardware is just as depressing as the terrible support for intel graphics.
Please comment if you think differently.