Mixed Signals
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Tuesday 20 May 2008, 4:10 PM
Heron's not so hardy after all
Is Ubuntu's Hardy Heron resting on its laurels? Ubuntu 8.04LTS - for Long Term Support - was widely expected to continue the platform's long, steady march towards impeccable reliability and usability. But instead of a shot on goal, it's looking more like a foul each day.
Our first impression of 8.04 was good - but we had enough trouble during the review that we couldn't recommend it for enterprise deployment. Since then, more problems have emerged. Take Six Annoyances In Hardy Heron, a blog post from a solid Ubuntu fan that details a number of places where the new distribution is notably worse than its predecessor. Some are trivial, some serious, but all are clearly mistakes. He also links to numerous other users who have their own concerns: this is part of a rising murmur of discontent from the Ubuntu heartlands that will carry on growing until the problems are acknowledged.
In fact, it's just one problem. 8.04LTS wasn't ready. Decisions had been made that weren't good decisions, mistakes had been made that weren't fixed, assumptions were assumed that weren't true. That's par for the course for any big project, and in something that relies on quite so many disparate parts as a Linux distribution, it's only surprising that there weren't more.
But one of the key benefits of open source is that it should be easier, not harder, to sort such issues out. You don't have to operate behind a cloak of commercial secrecy: the discussions, the decisions and their consequences are all on show and can be remedied far more effectively than if you launch them all at once on an unsuspecting world.
Mark Shuttleworth is trying to get the suppliers of Ubuntu's major components to adopt a common release cycle, which would on the face of it help with things like 8.04 having to choose between the reliable Firefox 2.0 or the late-beta version 3 that it actually shipped with - a choice that's looking like a mistake.
I think that wish is hopeless, if not actively harmful. While the commercial imperative to hit a shipping date is very strong with proprietary software - the tyranny of the quarterly cycle creates enormous financial pressure - it is far less so when you have the freedom to decide when something's good enough. Your stakeholders aren't looking for guaranteed revenue on the books by the end of Q2: they're looking for quality.
It is important to have long-term support for a product; it is less so to anoint that product in April, come what may. Trying to impose a commercial cycle on entire swathes of open source development risks importing many of the commercial model's problems and losing a lot of the freedom of choice that makes open source unique.
A better model for LTS versions of Ubuntu would be to have a far more relaxed schedule. Given a three- or five-year window of support for LTS versions, then it's important to have the successor up and in the market before the expiration of that window. But why limit the window to a fixed term? That's dangerous, even for highly controlled companies such as Microsoft.
Better to guarantee a minimum period of support for LTS, to be wound down when the next LTS-worthy version has been tested in the wild for long enough to prove its worth. With a nominal six-month upgrade cycle, you can even leave that particular target a year wide. When, and only when, a version is found to be satisfactory, trigger the changeover.
That leaves plenty of opportunity to change bad decisions, adopt good, stable versions of the components when they become available, and lets the users become confident that the new LTS is safe to adopt. Sure, it blurs the alpha-beta-RC-release lines - but rewriting the rules of software development is rather the point.
PreviousComments on this post
I think this article is a little forced and doesn't make any sense.
I am a 24hour technician that uses Ubuntu as a main platform to assist my clients. I assist them on the road or at the office and that means using web based utilities and perform remote control. I am doing this much better than with a Windows platform. Of course that the OS is not perfect! We will never see the perfect OS! I have customers using this OS to access WTS and they are really happy with it. I compared installations on several systems and Windows (any version!) will give me more problems and take longer because of drivers. Sometimes being really hard to find the download site for a specific driver!
Ubuntu makes our life much easier. So why did you write a so extense article just to put linux down? What happened in between articles?
I am a technician that makes money with all the MS problems but must be fair to my customers. I prefer to make money improving than troubleshooting. That would be much better for our economy too.
Please don't throw something out just because you don't have the capacity to do something. With MS products most of the people has the same or worse problems but because everybody got used to those problems (even the BSD!) then now they want linux to talk and think for them so they can have a break. Laziness is driving economy down too!
Our main problem? We don't see computer techs... we have a lot of MS techs!
I'm a big fan of open source, and Ubuntu in particular. I use it by preference, at home and at work, and I think it's an important, valuable part of IT.
Which is why it's important that it progresses. Since 6.06 (which my home server runs, currently at 173 days uptime on a rather ancient Compaq laptop), each new version has been better than before and easier to recommend to people. That's not currently true for 8.04.
Why that is, and what might be done to resume progress, is worth writing about. You only have to look at the effect Vista is having on Microsoft to see what happens when bad ideas get the upper hand. With Microsoft, it doesn't matter what you write - the company has never admitted to a mistake since the dawn of time - but I do have hope that Canonical will be responsive to the opinions of the community.
I read the article with interest, and thought it was fair, especially if you took the time to read the other referenced blog posting. I didn't get the impression that this Ubuntu release was a "disaster" or unusable, but that some things which worked in previous releases don't work (yet) in this release. On one hand, that is typical of a lot of new operating system releases; on the other hand, the "community" has come to expect better from Unbutu, they are held to a higher standard. That may or may not be fair, but it's the way things are.
Funnily enough, I had enormous trouble with Ubuntu 7.10 on my bog-standard beige box home computer. So far, 8.04 has worked like a charm...
If I recall correctly there were a few problems when 7.04 came out and, unusually, I did experience some difficulties. Currently, I have 8.04 installed on my brand new Lenovo X61 laptop in the Windows XP partition using Wubi (I didn't want to repartition) and, for what I do, it's performing very well and loads X times faster than Windows. Indeed it installed, including download time, rather faster than Windows XP and many times faster than Windows Vista would have done.
I have two long standing problems in Linux. One is my printer which just a brick, the other is streaming real media (e.g. BBC News) but which I have managed to resolve in 8.04 for the first time although the resolution might have worked in previous versions.
Even running in the Windows partition using Wubi, the wireless connection and all other hardware works faultlessly.
