Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

To the ubuntu developers, in particular those who deal with hardware 
drivers.



**** DISCLAIMER ***
Rather than using the pre-installed windows in my laptop, and giving bad 
publicity both to ubuntu and myself, I decided to spend some money of my 
own to purchase a kind of hardware that I already possess and even has 
an open source driver, which does however NOT work. So, if I am going to 
spend my money to remain a part of your community, please at least read 
this e-mail till the end, even if it is so long.

This is not a complaint, I suppose I can find my way out of this mess by 
buying various usb cards and returning them until I get the one that 
works, but I want to bring your attention to the problem of finding 
decent linux drivers for network cards, especially due to huge 
regressions in this area in recent releases of ubuntu, including the 
LTS. And this is also true for so many other components, so I am just 
calling for attention, not to me, but to (y)our distribution and (y)our 
hardware support.
*******************



I am the unlucky owner of an intel 3945 network card, internal to my 
laptop.

I say unlucky because, I have sadly to say this, it already used to be a 
bit broken when the default driver used to be ipw3495, but since when we 
have this new (completely open source?) driver, it created to me so many 
  problems that I can no longer use it. At home, it plays badly with my 
802.11b router and I get some 10kb/sec which go slowly down until 
frustrated I plug the cable in. Reported this bug a long while ago, also 
to upstream, but everybody is just waiting for us to throw away these 
802.11b routers, spend another bit of our money into consumer 
electronics, and pollute the environment a bit more.

Now I moved abroad for one month, and it doesn't see an access point (it 
mistakenly detected a network with a similar name, dunno why). I am 
constrained to use windows, and the bad thing is that the guy that 
shares the house with me was interested in linux until he asked me why I 
was using windows. I hate this. Will complete my bug report soon, but I 
had so many other little problems with this open source driver which we 
all are supposed to support by buying their cards, that I decided to get 
a new USB one.

Then I googled for a long time today, even found an UK resellers who 
only sells open hardware and they strongly endorsed the usage of rt2500 
chipsets because "the producer has embraced the GPL philosophy"... I 
don't know if this is true, but I went to launchpad and searched for 
bugs related to this chipset and found that also rt2500 has STOPPED 
WORKING in many situations in recent ubuntu releases.

Now, I really don't know which card to get, and won't trust any 
ubuntu-related source, since all of them say that iwl3945 works well, 
while it completely sucks, forgive me. This is a problem of mine, not 
yours. The question I want to raise is just.

***********************************************************************
For your own image, for the image of ubuntu, and for the sake of your 
users, are you ever going to become committed to quality hardware 
support, in particular starting to really prioritize all those 
regressions from feisty and gutsy?

Are you going to intel and demand more attention to their ubuntu 
customers, in particular making them notice that their beloved linux 
drivers sucks?
(As you are there you could also mention the complete lack of attention 
to problems in VGA out support in their graphics cards, ask toshiba or 
vaio users for details ;) )

Are you going to check those rt2500 bugs, so that I can trust your wikis 
and buy it?

Are you going to provide users a way (e.g. a tag that you watch) so that 
they can warn you of regressions, and are you consequently going to 
publish a page with ALL KNOWN BROKEN HARDWARE instead of just letting 
people pay for that hardware, and then having to use windows because 
they TRUSTED YOUR DOCUMENTATION that says it works, or just found a 
driver in the kernel that IS SUPPOSED TO work? Is it possible that I 
have to guess from launchpad bugs if rt2500 will work or not??? How is 
my non-geek friend supposed to guess what hardware to buy for its ubuntu?

These are not things that _I_ can do, it's UP TO YOU who ARE the 
distribution! So are you willing to do that or not?
***********************************************************************

People is actively reporting all regressions in times that I suppose 
beat microsoft beta testers. People is working for free for ubuntu, and 
ubuntu is working for free for people. That should be a good thing.

However, ubuntu is more and more broken, period. Intrepid is going to 
keep on broken hardware support inherited from hardy (in particular, 
iwl3945 and it seems also rt2500), and to break webcams and tablet PCs 
for most of us. For me, it also breaks audio input. When I showed a 
friend of mine that he could just plug his webcam and chat in his ubuntu 
in gutsy (he had called me to ask for... drivers : )) he said "it's 
better than windows!" and I was happy. With next release, people is 
going to say again that ubuntu is just a toy for nerds.

People will get tired and get back to windows. You will loose what is 
making you popular by definition: the quantity your _users_. The same 
friend of mine recently asked me about Suse because he was tired of 
bugs. Suse has the same bugs and worse, so I convinced him to stay with 
ubuntu, but I bet he is now tempted to stop using ubuntu at all - I hope 
he will not, though.

I fear that with intrepid, the popularity of ubuntu, the linux 
distribution that the masses liked, will slowly start to decrease, and 
this will also be the chance for microsoft to regain all those users and 
desktops that had been "converted" to ubuntu. Which still are a small 
minority of the IT users around the world.

Now, I told you what I wanted, hoping that there is some usefullness in 
sending such an e-mail. It's time to do my part for today, reboot in my 
network-disconnected ubuntu and report debug information to You.

Anyway, thanks for the good work in areas different from hardware 
support. Intrepid is lovely, every time I try it I really would like to 
be able to start using it. I hope to be in time for jaunty :)

Vincenzo