Stability of Ubuntu

[Lysander10]

Based on your experience, how would you rate the stability of Ubuntu as a whole?

[wolfen69]

ubuntu has been the most stable OS i have ever used. not perfect, but the best so far.

[steveneddy]

My server running Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS has been up for almost three months. I have run that server non-stop for a couple of years with no problems whatsoever.

[Donshyoku]

For some reason I can't figure out, every release after Dapper has caused Nautilis to crash a lot on three separate systems, and for applicatoins to simple freeze, making me put a hotkey on Force Quit. These are bundled apps too, and they work fine on all of my Fedora 6/7/8 installations and always have.

I still prefer Ubuntu, but those minors issues I can't seem to shake. I voted moderately stable.

[yabbadabbadont]

Your poll would make more sense if it related to a specific version of Ubuntu, as the quality has varied widely in my experience.

My personal experience has been that every other release is fairly stable. Dapper and Feisty were both very stable for me, but Edgy and Gutsy were unusable. Sort of like Star Trek movies.... ;)

Hopefully the pattern will continue and Hardy will be a good stable release. (It had better be as it is an LTS release...)

[Lysander10]

Your poll would make more sense if it related to a specific version of Ubuntu, as the quality has varied widely in my experience.

My personal experience has been that every other release is fairly stable. Dapper and Feisty were both very stable for me, but Edgy and Gutsy were unusable. Sort of like Star Trek movies.... ;)

Hopefully the pattern will continue and Hardy will be a good stable release. (It had better be as it is an LTS release...)

Yes, you are right. I really meant to ask about the desktop edition of Gutsy specifically, however, I'm not going to change it now.

[bobbybobington]

As far as stability goes I'd say, about 80% is hardware and 20% is software. Incompatible hardware can make things a nightmare, with good hardware though there can still be problems. Ubuntu can be weird. Random breakage occurs then it seems to fix itself. In the long term, you have to admit it's getting better, getting better all the time :guitar:.

[Lysander10]

As far as stability goes I'd say, about 80% is hardware and 20% is software. Incompatible hardware can make things a nightmare, with good hardware though there can still be problems. Ubuntu can be weird. Random breakage occurs then it seems to fix itself. In the long term, you have to admit it's getting better, getting better all the time :guitar:.

They may be so(or may not), but we're talking only about the software end of the spectrum. Ubuntu vs. other OSes on the same set of hardware.

[shouden]

I voted moderately stable. I have been using Ubuntu on every PC I own, aside from my media center PC and it has worked amazingly well on everything except my laptop. Although it detected all my laptops hardware and had drivers for all of it, Gnome locks up at least once a day and I have to restart the X server. I guess if the laptop was mission critical or something along those lines, it would be bad, but as it is all I do is wait for it to load X back up and resume my Firefox session.

[toa]

Based on your experience, how would you rate the stability of Ubuntu as a whole?

Look! Depends on what you’re basing "stable" on? For example is it a stable OS incase of having a good recovery control ? or is it stable in having backups for restore points or is it stable in case of user modding, or is it stable in the number of user errors and bug reports....

It all depends, in my opinion i think Ubuntu and Linux in general is stable to a limit, saying that for the flexibility that is being reached by users, having to change system files, modding controls, playing around with the settings and all made easy with how-to's might be risky specially for newbie’s.

Any OS has its flaws, if you take Ubuntu as is from the live CD its wonderfully doing the job, having exposed to third party sources and stuff, can be an instability factor.

Cutting it short, it depends but from my experience, Ubuntu can be 90% stable (client mode), server mode i still have a doubt (specially with heavy processing and other server involved)

"What do you like about Ubuntu" is another interesting question...


..

[agim]

All I had ever used before ubuntu was windows, and Ubuntu is a lot more stable. I have installed on a few machines, some Dells, an HP, a Compaq, a Toshiba. And have really never had any major hardware issues. Granted, some of these I didn't use long ( a rental computer, a couple of computers brought back from the grave just to see if I could) but my regular computer has been running Ubuntu for a couple of months without serious issue.

[justin whitaker]

I voted "moderately unstable". It's generally stable for me, because I run pretty basic hardware, and I know enough tricks to bring Linux back in line when it decides to get flakey....based on what I have seen going back to Hedgehog have been:

1. Not very smooth upgrade cycles from version to version. Every time a new version comes out, the changes are just enough to throw a wrench in a lot of systems, and the board gets flooded with "update broke my system" threads. You would think after all these iterations, they would have it down by now.

2. Open Bugs that never get solved. Launchpad is full of bug reports that go unanswered, or are marked that it could not be replicated, and still people are reporting the issue. I think the Devs need to spend some time on the forums and see the problems people are having, rather than simply looking for the things they can easily solve on Launchpad.

3. New features, instead of making the core system stable. Some people think that Gutsy was unstable....Hardy is the next LTS, and new features and programs are added. Is that actually wise?

I think Ubuntu is great. It's relatively compact, installs quickly, has a fairly solid offering of software, is easy to use, and has a great community around it.

But, I would not call it stable.

[Djalmahal]

Hi,

i have Ubuntu (mu first Linux Distro ever) for 6 weeks now, I really like it, but hey, it definitly surprises you sometimes. I'm not an expert, it seems like a lot of things that go wrong have to do with Compiz (disappearance of windows titles, suddenly the <Super> key shortcuts don't work anymore etc), but Ubuntu itself suddenly behaves odd sometimes; Like today, i actually got a dualboot with Windows XP running on the other partition, and suddenly the windows partition doesn't show up anymore when I boot. I The dissaearance of this patition is probably due to some update that i ran last night and I can probably fix it by modifiyng the GRUB file, but for me that takes looking up tutorials and trying things out. Definitly helps you to lean more about your computer but it doesn't really sound like "it just works".

Now, the all time classic, I have a Panel on the top of my screen with the MainMenu, some launcher, workspace switcher and some more icons. Even though I locked their position they keep moving around, they just arrange themself in some new order and spacing.

I'm going to stick to Ubuntu for my usual day to day interaction with my computer and I'm all into the philosophy behind Linux and open Source software, but I do hope that Hardy Heron gets much more stable.

And hey, whenever something goes wrong, I can always count on Ubuntuforums.org, I had real good experiences with people helping me out here, taking some of their time to ask me crucial questions and providing me with spot on answers (sometimes less spot on).

Andreas

[Lysander10]

Look! Depends on what you’re basing "stable" on? For example is it a stable OS incase of having a good recovery control ? or is it stable in having backups for restore points or is it stable in case of user modding, or is it stable in the number of user errors and bug reports....

It all depends, in my opinion i think Ubuntu and Linux in general is stable to a limit, saying that for the flexibility that is being reached by users, having to change system files, modding controls, playing around with the settings and all made easy with how-to's might be risky specially for newbie’s.

Any OS has its flaws, if you take Ubuntu as is from the live CD its wonderfully doing the job, having exposed to third party sources and stuff, can be an instability factor.

Cutting it short, it depends but from my experience, Ubuntu can be 90% stable (client mode), server mode i still have a doubt (specially with heavy processing and other server involved)

"What do you like about Ubuntu" is another interesting question...


..

The key phrase there was "as a whole." You're missing the forest for the trees...

[mivo]

Ubuntu has been very stable for me. There have been some minimal Compiz-Fusion issues after kernel updates (which required me to turn off and back on Compiz-Fusion). Of the few freeze-ups I experienced, none required a hard reboot, and I have never lost data. So, there is room for improvement, but all in all, Ubuntu has been stable for me -- certainly more so than other OSes (well, CP/M+ never crashed on me, but that was over two decades ago, so my memory may suffer from nostalgia ;)).

[3rdalbum]

What do you mean by "stability"? In Linux, the word "stability" often refers to how often the packages change.

[aysiu]

Hoary Hedgehog (Ubuntu 5.04) was rock solid for me.

Breezy Badger (5.10) might as well have been called Buggy Badger. Despite the bugs, I had no major stability problems.

Dapper Drake (6.06) had all sorts of problems (people now like to think of it as stable because it's called a Long-Term Support release, but it was a nightmare when it first came out). If I recall correctly, this was the release that had an X server update pretty much kill X on a lot of Ubuntu users' computers (including mine).

Edgy Eft (6.10) had a lot of application crashes in Gnome for me, but the basic X server had no problems or freezes or weird things going on.

Feisty Fawn (7.04) gave me some problems with the system freezing up (yes, totally freezing--mouse, keyboard, nothing would work), but on an application level, there was a lot of stability for me.

Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) has been one of the worst releases since 5.10 on my computer. It still has the occasional unexplained freeze (less frequent than in Feisty), but it also has a lot of random application problems (Flash update not working--the MD5 thing; Audacity not playing back recorded audio).

Overall, I would say Ubuntu is stable, but I've actually found XP to be stabler in my experience (yes, my experience--I'm not trying to make generalizations here). Nevertheless, I prefer Ubuntu over other OSes. Apart from its bugginess and occasional instability, it generally does what I need it to do, and it's fun to use.

[zero244]

I am running Edgy on this machine.....Ive been using Edgy for over a year. I seems very stable....I think I have had only one complete crash.
One thing I do that many will not agree too, is once I get my system stable and running the way I like.
I Stop doing updates to Ubuntu or the software I use.
I did a system update when I first installed Edgy and have not done any updates since then.
It seems to me many people start having problems when they continue to update stuff.
Since my machine is running perfectly I dont see any need to jeopardize things by doing updates.

[Lysander10]

I am running Edgy on this machine.....Ive been using Edgy for over a year. I seems very stable....I think I have had only one complete crash.
One thing I do that many will not agree too, is once I get my system stable and running the way I like.
I Stop doing updates to Ubuntu or the software I use.
I did a system update when I first installed Edgy and have not done any updates since then.
It seems to me many people start having problems when they continue to update stuff.
Since my machine is running perfectly I dont see any need to jeopardize things by doing updates.

From what I understand, simply running updates will not usually break a Linux box, since Linux is modular by nature, and therefore everything is not interconnected, as is the case in Windows. It would make more sense to just refrain from upgrading to the next version of Ubuntu, until support for your version has run out, IMHO, and from my experience. But if you have no need to ever run updates, and your box is stable the way it is, then do whatever works best for you : )

[justin whitaker]

Overall, I would say Ubuntu is stable, but I've actually found XP to be stabler in my experience (yes, my experience--I'm not trying to make generalizations here). Nevertheless, I prefer Ubuntu over other OSes. Apart from its bugginess and occasional instability, it generally does what I need it to do, and it's fun to use.

I think that pretty much sums it up for me, and much more succinctly than I did.

Of course, I usually start running the next version during the Alpha phase, so I must not mind the bugginess very much.

[armandh]

a good install of ubuntu is stable but when I start changing to non ubuntu drivers/codex/etc that is where I have had trouble in the past.
when one has control of everything expect things to get out of control.

[matherians2]

It has been at least a week since I installed Ubuntu. So far so good!

[Vadi]

Very stable - I've only seen some bad 3rd party apps misbehaving, but that in no way can be attributed to the OS.