Oh, please, please, COME ON Ubuntu development people!

[Gilles Gravier]

Hello!

On 16/04/2011 15:59, Basil Chupin wrote:
> On 15/04/2011 19:24, Ric Moore wrote:
>> On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 11:10 +0200, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>>> What I want to add to the debate is that this is a "BETA" version. We
>>> are talking about a product not yet finished. Not yet ready for
>>> mission-critical use.
>>>
>>> I understand Basil being upset. But in a way, he "asked for it". When
>>> one downloads a beta, one does so expecting to get into trouble, and to
>>> report these bugs. And complaining strongly that a beta is buggy is,
>>> well, to say the least, not what is expected of a user of a beta.
>>>
>>> That kind of complaining *MIGHT* be justified *ONLY* once the
>>> product is
>>> final... :)
>> Basil has been around enough to know about Beta's. Now that he's got
>> some good information, he can make better choices. It just didn't act as
>> he thought it would/should. Stuff is changing! Heck, I still miss line
>> numbered BASIC. But, if the installer can check for the fastest mirror,
>> which there is an option for with RPM, if I recall correctly, it would
>> be better. I've seen some less than modem speeds recently during
>> updates. Me, I decided after doing the Fedora thing for some time, that
>> I don't make a good beta tester. I'm getting too long in the tooth. But,
>> Basil's thing wasn't that it was a Beta, but that he couldn't get
>> installed. At that point, it appears more an Alpha than a Beta. :) Ric
>
>
> I came to the following conclusion last night - and your comments
> contain some of those conclusions in one way or another.
>
> The only people who do any 'testing' of these Linux distros, or even
> try and use them, are old farts who have nothing better to do other
> than waste whatever remaining time they have on this earth in trying
> to appear useful for some cause - in this case pretending they have a
> great big interest in trying to convert the world to use a Linux
> distro of their "choice" when they perfectly well know, but still
> delude themselves that this is not the case, that 99.9% of the world
> is not going to stop using Windows or Apple MAC but change over to
> some Linux distro.
>
> The only interest the old farts seem to have in this whole affair is
> having some sort of social life by belonging to the mail lists and
> where they can parry and trust with words and put down people at the
> first opportunity.
>
> They even go around organising "Release Parties" - such as is
> currently being done here in Australia - to "celebrate" the release of
> Natty in a couple of weeks!
>
> The only comments the old farts can contribute to some adverse remark
> about something such as what is being talked about here is, "But its
> ONLY a Beta, HA, HA, HA, and EVERYBODY knows you pay no attention to
> what a Beta doesn't do! and so don't complain but help to propagate
> this delusion that your "testing" is important and submit a BUG report
> (woohoo! a BUG report - that magical expression, "BUG report", which
> suddenly is intended to confer on you membership of the inner circle
> of a special corp of Boy Scouts whose members are most likely to have
> an average age of 75 years!).

I'm an old fart. Heck, I was born before FTP even existed! I was online
when the first commercial (i.e. not research/edu/darpa) internet
operators were set up. When I started using internet, you didn't pay for
it. You provided part of the infrastructure and that was your share of
keeping the thing running... then people started to pay to get internet
for their businesses. When I was in my 2nd job, I had to actually port
PGP to my company MIPS RC-3230 system in order to encrypt an e-mail that
was to be, then, sent by UUCP in order to order a geek T-shirt from Adam
Black in the UK. I was in my 3rd job when Mosaic (the first internet
browser) was announced. And I was wrong in thinking Java would get
nowhere back in 1994 when it was still called Oak.

> How many young people have been converted to using Linux - but let's
> say, Ubuntu?
I was. I was a Windows user. Then my Windows machine broke. I was told
"try Linux". I was already hooked on NetBSD for my server (which has
been online in one shape or another - now running Ubuntu 10.10 - since
1998). I had been using Yggdrasil (anybody on this list still remember
that Linux), Mandrake (now called Mandriva), and had looked at Debian. I
installed Ubuntu 6.04 (that tells you the year) and I was converted. I
was already a 30+ year old fart, granted...
> Bugger all I would say.
Or you can remain polite.
> The only people talking about Linux are old farts - not young people.
> The young ones go for the latest version of Firefox and Chrome - but
> even these are not available to them in a released version of a distro
> because such things are not backported.
Say, have you ever been to FOSDEM, Basil? Have you looked at the
demographics of that strongly-Linux-tainted event? The average age is
under 20. At what age do you start calling people old farts? 18?
> And when some young person comes along and starts to ask questions,
> what do the old farts say to him/her? "Don't expect us to do your
> homework/assignment for you! Go and google for the information you
> free loader!".
You asked the wrong people? Or, refering to my statement above, maybe
you forgot to ask politely...
> About 4 years ago in another distro I suggested to the 'boss' of the
> project to give a copy of the distro to all the kids in his street and
> ask them to tear the system apart and find all the faults in it so
> that the faults can be rectified before it is finally released. Yeah,
> right..... The only people still doing any testing are old
> farts......and young kids don't get to know Linux.
Go to FOSDEM. Rethink that statement after.
> And speaking of which..... and I will not make any further
> comment/observation on this matter.... some parts of Natty crashed on
> me today. When the crashes occurred I was asked if I want to submit a
> report to help the developers solve the crashes - I answered YES and
> reports were generated; but then I was asked to provide my name,
> e-mail address, a password for some account, the size of my shoes,
> religious inclinations, my inside leg measurement - which I refused to
> do and so the developers got zilch to help them solve the crashes. If
> the system generates the damn crash report why the heck should I
> provide all such unnecessary details? Is someone afraid that I could
> waste my time coming up with a bogus report just to get my jollies off?
Alan already answered that one... Ovbiously you are becoming an old fart
yourself if you don't remember the account you set up 4 years ago.
Alzheimers? :)
> Anyway, complaining or pointing out some problems is not what using an
> operating system is about. I want to use it to do things and not spend
> time reporting on hassles. So, from now on just reading what is
> written by people and keeping up with the people I got to know here.
Talking about an operating system... If you want to "us it to do
things"... then don't use a beta. Use a stable released version. Using a
beta is agreeing (explicitely or implicitely depending on how the
project is structured) that you expect to find bugs and constructively
report them so they get fixed.

The only operating system I know of for which its users are unknowing
beta testers is MS Windows when a new release is commercialized. SP1 is
usually the "stable version". :)
> When you think about it, many, many people have spent time and effort
> in coding, looking for hassles, reporting the hassles only to find now
> that whatever they have been doing for a long time has been for nought
> and now they - if they consider that there is no other life for them
> outside of reporting 'bugs' - have to start all over again because
> Unity is here! "Sorry, but stuff this for a joke", is what I expect
> some people to conclude.
What you probably mean is that this is what YOU conclude.

Fortunately, there are users of Ubuntu, a lot of them here on this list,
that understand what they get into when they download a "beta version",
and submit bugs, ALL OF WHICH (because they follow the process to submit
them) end up in https://launchpad.net/ and are processed by the
development team to make the product better.

Gilles