Broken session idling/power management in Karmic

[George Farris]

On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 09:36 +0000, Alexander H Deriziotis wrote:
> 
>         Is there hope for this to be fixed in karmic? 
> 
> I'm no developer, but I think that's very unlikely.
> 
> It seems to me your best bet would be to try and avoid using the
> software which breaks the idle-indicators, or if that's too much
> hassle, just skip Karmic altogether and hope it's fixed in Lucid.
> 
> Ubuntu does ship pretty bleeding edge software provided by upstream,
> so regressions are to be expected. It's only a 6 month wait after all.
> 
According to this logic nothing will ever get smoothed out and quite
frankly we're all getting a little tired of that.

What they should do is publicly mark this distro:

"We have just released Karmic, due to the many upstream technology
changes such as HAL depreciation, inclusion of Empathy, etc, etc, please
consider this a bleeding edge distro not meant for regular distribution.
Business and regular users may want to consider sticking with an older
release or waiting for 10.04"

I've been using Ubuntu since Warty and I understand the logic in the
Linux community of "HAL isn't doing what we want, we're ripping it out
and replacing it".  I think that is a great thing, something we have
over the other OS's, but don't paint Karmic as the greatest thing since
sliced bread.  Take 9.10 and tune it until it "just works" and then have
a marketing frenzy.

Trust me, working at the University and also running the Linux users
group in the area, it would be much better to point at the release and
say, "see this is marked as a development version, you can expect fairly
basic things not to work".  People are happy with that, the press is
happy with that, business is happy with that.

What I would hate to see is, wonderful press release about Karmic,
blathering on about all the goodness, only to have people rip it apart
due to some fairly visible bugs.

Lets just be up front about it and not drop any nasty surprises on
people.

Cheers
George