Distrowatch on Dapper - "a disappointment".

[Sonique]

I didnt read other other posts sorry but anyways:

like what the hell? 6 weeks!! thats it! ubuntu made the idea of a 6 month cycle so they can break there own rules. also fitting to 6 months isnt easy, look at microsoft! one of the biggest companies in the world and are having trouble to bring an new OS like 5 YEARS later.

[luca.b]

One install (alternate install) and two dist-upgrades on three systems overal (including a production machine). The only issues I'm experiencing are on the laptop, and because of the non-free fglrx driver (ATI sucks).
No problems at all in everything else.

[hizaguchi]

Like so many others, I'm not a fan of the live CD. Took forever to boot, ran horribly slow, and all that. I understand the advantages of a live CD (you can test the hardware support before you commit to the OS, Linux newcommers get a nice, pretty welcome), but I really hope the ncurses installer remains an option. It is just plain faster, no matter how much improvement goes into the graphical installer. And the speed at which I can get a computer installed is way more important than how pretty the experience is.

The old installer is one of the best and easiest to use OS installers I've ever seen. I understand that people want graphics, but 99% of the time trying to make a pretty installation program just turns out over-complicated. Really, the only installation I've ever seen where the graphical interface actually made things easier is PCBSD. Any chance Ubuntu could just borrow from them?

[awakatanka]

If you have a test partition or test machine available, you might want to consider doing a test install of Dapper rather than an upgrade. I've read quite a number of posts from people who had difficulties with upgrade, but got clean installs.

IMHO, upgrades work best for people who who have nealy "stock" installations with relatively few added programs or customizations. With best intent, upgrading "real" installs is a pretty difficult thing. Assuming a good data backup, doing a fresh Ubuntu install and program installation via tools like automatix is pretty easy.

One of the few good things to come from my Windows experience has been my appreciation of the value of periodic clean installs. Mandatory for Windows, but valuable for Linux too.

I installed a while back on my brothers laptop a clean install of kubuntu breezy and added some apps that are in the repo. He doesn't has any rights to install anything and a week ago i did a dist-upgrade. It was a total failure.

I thought it was one of the strong points of a debian based distro, easly upgrade to new version.

Also tryed it with a test pc at work install ubuntu breezy and after that dist-upgrade to dapper, again problem. I did it also a few time when dapper was still alpha/beta and didn't had troubles then, but now it has. Sorry but it was one of the strong points a debian based distro had and now i can't trust it.

Also got some strange lockups if i right click on desktop in kde, the right click menu doesn't come up and it hangs.

Livecd is realy slow compared to other livecd's but installer does it job now but still got the feeling it was rushed.

[therunnyman]

Is the verse, "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier," really stupid, or is it just me? I grow old, wear my trousers rolled, but if that's what's passing for lyrics these days, throw me in a quiet home and let me sleep in my own ordure.

Here's my thing, and I think it's pretty serious: Dapper can't hang with RAIDs consisting of more than two disks, not without hours of cautious, painstaking and delicate watchmaker tinkering, anyhow. Since the dawn of time, Linux has been the OS of choice for servers, right? Because of its stability, security, self-explanatory existence? Even a triceratops could use it?

If I can't make a nice RAID 5 - especially when the installer says, hey man, make a RAID 5 - what's the use? Dapper can't even enumerate ancillary devices correctly. Gotta draw the line at disks. If a Linux OS an't handle disks, f$%k it.

And, and, bastard developer...oh, nevermind.

runny

[xeero]

It would be nice to see percentages for these things. Like how many users had critical problems and how many are usable. Since Ubuntu has a huge user base, we'll undoubtedly see more problems in absolute numbers. like someone else mentioned, other big software products have their problems too.

For me, I've recently switched from Mepis to Dapper. Dapper has also made me a Gnome fan. I still think Mepis and KDE are good, but now I like Ubuntu and Gnome better.

(btw, what prevented me from sticking with Ubuntu (Breezy at the time) before was the whole sudo thing. but, i created the first user as my "root" user and edited my setup so that users are asked for the root password instead of their user password for system admin stuff. this setup works okay for me.)

But... just yesterday i noticed that Swiftfox crashed on me twice. also, Nautilus disappeared on me once. not good. i'll see if this continues. everything else on the surface seems good. but, haven't tried Samba or printing yet.... if i try them and they don't work, then maybe i'll try Breezy again.

Regarding the live-CD, i don't really use it to demo for myself or anyone else, since in general they're painfully slow. but, what i love is that there are many distros that come on a single cd. better than using up 3+ cds when you don't even use many of the included apps anyway.

IMHO, I hope that Ubuntu concentrates on reliability instead of trying to be bleeding edge. The previous post is right. If you can't count on the basic functions being handled reliably, then all bets are off! I want to see Ubuntu succeed.