upgrade from 9.04 - 9.10: the most broken Ubuntu / Debian upgrade I have ever experienced

Mario Vukelic mario.vukelic at dantian.org
Wed Nov 4 06:41:54 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 03:31 +0100, Remco wrote:
> Ouch, that's bad. Whether it's true or not doesn't even matter. 

The Register is trying to drive visits up. It was bound to happen with
increasing popularity, there is always something to be gained by
shooting down last year's favorite. Nothing new here.

The cases that are listed mean nothing at all without numbers and
context. It will never be hard to find five upgrades going wrong when
millions of people upgrade (and the Register and /. should remember this
when spinning the next sensationalist Windows story, too). And quoting a
poll on ubuntuforums -- pleeeaaase, ever heard of self-selection? I
upgraded at alpha 5 without a hitch but I surely did not tell a poll
about it.

All in all they cite one (!) bug report in the article and this was
already marked as won'tfix because it looks suspiciously like user
error . "Sounds like you probably have a proprietary driver compiled
against kernel version X, but have upgraded to kernel version Y. Because
they are closed source, the driver has to be rebuilt for a given kernel
version, which means you have to take care to match your kernel and
video driver versions, else it'll break."

Otherwise the Register quotes "Ubuntu forum member w00ly, who decried
the lack of automation on encrypting his home partition". Decried,
really? Well let's read on - 'w00ly wrote: "I certainly wish the
encryption mounting process was more automated like everything else
is!!"'  Fair point, but hardly a catastrophy. 

And then we have a few cases of fallout of the usplash/xsplash & KMS
transition, which currently indeed makes the boot look less polished, at
least for users without Intel graphics.

This is a shoddy, shoddy piece of journalism and whether Karmic sucks or
is great, we won't learn about it from the Register, apparently. I trust
the launchpad statistics and the general feeling of supporters in forums
and mailing lists more, and as Derek mentioned recently, there is less
noise on the user list than for other releases.





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