Giving up on Edgy

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 19:25 -0800, NoOp wrote:
> That might be a valid point (unofficial stuff), but wouldn't explain the
> further problems with the fresh install.

Of course it wouldn't

> (long story about Edgy pain snipped)

Poor guy :)

>  (Debian backup instructions snipped)
> Many new Ubuntu "upgraders" may not know what to backup beforehand, so
> it might be wise if Ubunutu took the same approach and provided similar
> instructions.

Certainly. Or, ideally (given Ubuntu's target audience), an automated
solution

> > 
> >> Bottom line is that Edgy is buggy and IMHO should have never been
> >> released, nor should it be promoted as the primary Ubuntu distro.
> > 
> > "Not released" I don't think so, "promoted differently" I agree
> 
> On that we disagree. Not only did the upgrade (following the upgrade
> instructions to the letter) trash the existing 6.06 system, the fresh
> install via the Alternate CD required considerable work/patching just to
> get it to work at all.
(stuff about links snipped)
> 
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285446
> 
>  The upgrade went perfectly!  	266  	24.45%
> I had a few problems. 		353 	32.44%
> I encountered serious problems. (for example, can't connect to
> Internet) 				213 	19.58%
> Things went really badly and I can't [ log in, boot, etc ]! 							256
> 23.53%
> 
> A 43.11% rate of serious or "really badly" problems indicates to me that
> Edgy should be withdrawn and sent back to beta. For the time being
> (maybe a rather long time) I'll stick to 6.06.

I am sure that in reality you know more about statistics than to really
mean what you said. These self-selected internet polls mean
_nothing_at_all. Seriously. After reading those numbers you do not have
any more data than before. You would have to sample a statistically
valid group. Drawing conclusions from such a poll is just fooling
yourself. Of course I don't have data that says that Edgy is successful
either. I'm just cautioning you against what you seem to believe is
meaningful data.

One thing is clear: there are always PCs out there where a particular
system fails to install correctly at first try (or at all). I have seen
it with Windows, and I have seen it with most distros I have used over
the last 10 years (which were mainly, IIRC,  Slackware, SuSE, RedHat,
Debian, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu; I guess I played shortly with a few
more). Saying that a particular system "should not have been released"
because of a few problematic cases you know about can be interpreted
anywhere between foolhardy and trollish, depending on context.

For example the WLAN in my old laptop did not work reliably with
network-manager in Dapper. It did in Edgy. So, Edgy was good for me.
Should I have concluded from my earlier experience that Dapper should
not have been released? Should Edgy not have been released because other
users were less lucky? Hard to say without real data, but I certainly
did not answer that poll.

On my new laptop, received at about the same time as Edgy was released,
everything went absolutely flawless except that the GUI was slow as
molasses. It turned out that the vesa driver was being used since the
ati driver did not support the ATi chipset in this laptop. (I have no
control over the hardware, it's from work and runs primarily windows, I
just added a small Ubuntu partition for the times when I am on the road
with it). Installing fglrx and quite a lot of fiddling with xorg.conf
made it work,and now it is simply an awesome machine. I could easily
have written some blog, ranting about how Edgy sucks. Would that mean
anything? No.

Regards,
Mario