[Fwd: Re: Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu]

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 14:41 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> I just don't think it's appropropriate to
> introduce marketing-speak into a technical discussion.

I thought it is important inasmuch as your target user group has impact
on the design of your product. Debian has a different target group than
Ubuntu, and IMHO therefore different principles apply.

> Yes but is it clearly documented somewhere that the old tried and true
> method of upgrading for us "os-experts" no longer works?

The Dapper release notes and upgrade instructions clearly say that if
you don't use the update-manager, you should make sure that
ubuntu-desktop is installed before upgrading. IMO that implies not that
it is impossible to upgrade otherwise, but it does imply that if you
don't follow the instructions here, that you yourself have to look out
for undesired package removals.


> I suspect the oreillynet author is one of these "os-experts" and expects
> the way they've always upgraded to still be supported.

I hope an expert would either read the instructions, or at least prevent
the removal of important packages.

> I think it is a usability problem that so many of the more experienced
> users are having this "ubuntu-desktop got uninstalled" issue.  Maybe
> upgrades (either via update-manager or apt) should just always install
> it.

AFAIK now, update-manager does. It might be more a bug in the
ubunut-users mailing list and the forums, and other
erroneous/outdated/incomplete info on the web, where far too often a
quick "in a terminal, sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources list, replace breezy
with dapper, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" [1] is tossed out
to users who should be rather told to go to System/Administration/Update
Manage and follow the instructions.

[1] Where even the apt-get is wrong, Debian recommends aptitude nowadays
too