I bought a 160 gigabyte hard disk to store my / and swap, and use my 500 gig HDD for /home. I also bought another 2 gigabytes of RAM, and promptly tried installing it the wrong way :-) The chips are on the other side compared to my existing RAM, lol.
Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit edition. And now I regret it.
1. There’s something seriously wrong with my wireless driver. Under Gutsy and Hardy, Network Manager shows 70% signal strength and the wireless works fine (drops out every couple of hours on average, but otherwise it’s okay). Under Intrepid, the signal strength shows as a ridiculous 14%, with signal quality just 12%! Downloads go to approximately 3 kilobytes per second every 3 megabytes, and stay there for up to 30 seconds before returning to normal speeds. The connection is more prone to completely dropping out. I’ve filed a bug report, but THESE SORTS OF REGRESSIONS SHOULDN’T HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE.
2. PulseAudio is more broken than before! I can type my username and password at the login screen and press Enter before the login screen sound actually comes out of my speakers. I just tried launching “Which Way Is Up?” and having it segfault because PulseAudio was throwing an error. I killed Pulseaudio and changed my sound outputs back to ALSA and the game runs perfectly.
I’ve also lost my Gnome sound effects. I like the audial feedback I get from them. That’s gone now, and I’m sure PulseAudio is the problem.
3. The much-hyped Darkroom theme is unusable for me. The theme shows promise, but the orange highlights and white text fields just have too much contrast. Hurts my eyes. I changed the colours so that the scroll boxes and things were the same brown, and the input boxes were a dark orange, but it still didn’t look that great. I ended off installing White, which is a beaut white-and-orange theme, because the Dapper-era Human theme with the orange lights on the scrollboxes is gone, and replaced with a Clearlooks-based alternative.
4. Jockey has some regressions, like for instance, it doesn’t install my Nvidia driver anymore. I had to get it from the repository myself, which is mystifying. At least Jockey realises that I’ve manually installed it, but unfortunately the Appearance control panel likes to check with Jockey first before enabling Compiz, which means I get an annoying “Checking for drivers…” progress bar before it finally tries running Compiz.
The original problem with Jockey might have been because I used the straight “Install Ubuntu” option at the Desktop CD’s boot menu rather than boot into the live environment. On a non-wired connection, you wouldn’t get an internet connection, so the installer wouldn’t update the Apt listing, and when you tried using Jockey, Apt wouldn’t find the package it wants to install, and Jockey doesn’t recognise the error message provided by Apt and just thinks everything has gone swimmingly.
Considering that the “Install Ubuntu” option is an official part of Ubuntu, and that the problem didn’t let up even after I updated Apt, this is a bad bug.
5. I believe performance is down. Login on a fresh two-HDD install with almost no desktop items or services takes nearly as long as my old packed-to-the-brim Hardy install did. The disturbing thing was that my Hardy install was heavily fragmented, and the disk seeking was causing the login to go slowly. With Intrepid, the hard disk doesn’t seem to be actually doing much during login. Why is it going so slowly? Compiz doesn’t feel quite so smooth either.
6. Suspend is broken. In the last days of my Hardy install, I discovered that Suspend worked. The machine won’t suspend or hibernate with Intrepid, it just crashes.
7. Screens And Graphics is gone. No sooner did Ubuntu’s developers get that program working properly, than they remove it. Telling X to use the Nvidia driver I installed from the repositories requires a trip to the command-line again! It’s like a little slice of 2006!
8. Pidgin seems to have some new bugs. Every time I start up, it asks me if I want to authorise or deny my addition to somebody’s friends list. Then it tells me that there was an unknown error causing the user not to be added. The Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin is currently the only thing keeping me from using Meebo in Prism.
9. IPv6. Yes, IPv6 is STILL enabled by default, despite it being incompatible with most routers and ISPs. It has been causing slow and irresponsive web browsing on Ubuntu since 2004, the they STILL ENABLE IT BY DEFAULT. And it’s not obvious where to turn it off… the Networking control panel has vanished. I had some idea that gufw had an option to disable it, but no, there’s no option there for that. Once again, in order to use your Ubuntu system, you seem to require a trip to the command-line. I’m not averse to the command-line, but I couldn’t remember the location of the file I had to edit. I had to look online with faultering internet… which of course didn’t work. I had to use my Wii to look online for the location of the file I had to edit.
I upgraded because I thought it would probably stop my wireless from disconnecting every few hours. Boy was I wrong there. I thought it would fix the PulseAudio situation where Flash would monopolise the audio output. Well, I haven’t tried Flash yet, but this time around PulseAudio has fucked up the rest of the system.
My faith in open-source software has taken a severe hit. There are always little bugs that you have to get familiar with, but Intrepid is a clear case of regression, and it makes me wonder what the Ubuntu folks have been doing the last six months. I’ve now decided not to upgrade my father’s Mint system to the next version of Mint, and if the next release of Ubuntu isn’t better than Hardy I’m seriously going to be considering a change of distribution.
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Thanks for the review and the warning. I think I’ll stay put with Hardy and save myself all this trouble.
Thanks for the heads-up. I have friends using Ubuntu. I’ll let them know. I can’t understand why Ubuntu insist on ‘rebuilding’ the complete system every 6-months. An upgrade is like a re-install? Me? I use Debian testing/unstable and have had no problems at all.
Hope your Ubuntu get better soon.
Thanks for the great review. These errors are fully true for Xubuntu also. But I can say all of the *buntu cannot handle my Realtek ALC861 (Intel HDA Audio) correctly. If i Install my progs into xubuntu, then the whole system slows down, but compiz isn’t enabled.
I don’t know what the hell are doing inside the *buntu devs, but why can’t just for ONE release bug hunted, better than only “if doesn’t work -we just remove it, or switch it out”? Worse, that *buntu disro’s more and more just HYPE, and i feel not much really work behind it. I didn’t see that *buntu devs are comitting patches for kernel, or anything else. It seems, that just waiting out what changes - and put it on an new version number. Great. This was my last probe with *buntu’s. I turn back for real developing community, but not for hype debian remakers.
I agree with you. I’ve been using ubuntu since Hoary and Kubuntu from Breezy. I’m an active member of ubuntu-ve (Venezuela) and in my mind the idea of changing distros never did show up until now (Intrepid Ibex). It’s too buggy! In kubuntu’s case it’s worse… you can’t even downgrade to KDE3! The truth being said, I personally think that this release is a regression. The unsupported legacy graphic card issue is affecting us directly, Ive got 2 desktops at home and 2 at the office with legacy nvidia and ati cards that are condemned to no 3D accel!
I presume that Canonical may not be aware that Intrepid Ibex may become their VISTA.
I didn’t experience all of those problems but I didn’t have it installed long enough to find out. My wireless card was detected and installed drivers for it for once which got me excited. (Broadcom 4318 in a Dell D600) Then I would only have an internet connection for about a minute and a half then it would stop passing data. The connection still was solid but I couldn’t get to the net again unless I disconnected and reconnected to my router, then I’d get another minute or so of browsing. Back to Opensuse which has a lot of pains but at least the wireless capability is flawless for me.
Sorry, I experienced no such issues here. Everything just works better, my nvidia driver was found, and it works faster (even though I reinstalled to get the full harddrive encryption on!).
Those reasons –and others– are the reasons why I’m sticking with Debian in spite of Ubuntu’s friendliness.
Ubuntu has progressively become worse and worse, and if you dare criticize the direction of the distro, Ubuntu Fan Boy wrath shall rain down upon thee.
I’ve had some problems with Intrepid too. Go back to Hardy if it works for you. You dont HAVE to have the latest version of everything!
Well for me Intrepid is a mixed blessing because it works on my gf’s netbook when Hardy wouldn’t. But I am keeping my main workstation on Hardy because … when you think about it … there is no REASON to upgrade unless something was broken before or there is a new feature you need. Sounds like you don’t have a reason to upgrade. Don’t upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
You seem like you were personally hurt by this release.
Relax.
It’s just software.
You didn’t pay for it, you don’t have to use it.
That said I really hope they focus on bug-fixing, patching, and stability for the next release instead of tacking on more broken features. We dont want any more “features”, we want everything to work painlessly.
Someone who says it all! I’ve had quite some troubles as well…
For me wake on lan and automatic network configuration stopped working (pretty bad on my server),
I’ve had some issues with KDE 4 there, too. The packages used the .kde directory for settings or somehow else managed to remove all my precious settings I had in with KDE 4.1.2 in Hardy. Also there’s a horrible flickering when you have set up more than one display and my video playback was also stuttering because of that… etc. etc.
It’s strange; I had issue #1 (wireless weirdness) when I went from Dapper to Hardy (clean install). On the upside, I can now see signal strength in the network manager applet on my Broadcom BCM4318-based card (by Buffalo). I like the input about the “Darkroom” theme, I’m guessing that’s the new official darker one that everyone’s talking about, so, thanks for that. All I wanted fixed in Hardy, were the PulseAudio/Flash issues, and I found recently that there are some user-created backported packages to fix that. Yes, it should be perfect from the get-go, but, who’s perfect?
In response to the comment that Ubuntu has gotten progressively worse… I’m going from LTS to LTS. I like the security of having a stable system, which receives minor updates for a long time. In comparison, Hardy is much better than Dapper, with a number of refinements. Some are not attributed solely to the Ubuntu team, but as a distribution, I can’t say that we’re worse off now than in 2006.
I also think that IPV6 is a necessity, and that using the Internet will be much easier once we have widespread support for the protocol. Unfortunately, no one wants to take that first step. I believe the situation with KDE3/KDE4 and PulseAudio to be similar, i.e. they will be excellent once they are mature and in wide use, but we can’t jump directly to the finish line. I applaud the supporters of these new technologies; both the distributions that take a chance, and the users that put up with bugs and issues on the road to a better tomorrow.
I had issues with Hardy when it first was released. Give it a few. Bleeding edge is rarely the route to go on systems you need to function reliably and dependably. I’ve yet to upgrade to Ibex, I’ll be waiting a month or two.
I’m with Jason. I put Hardy on my built-from-parts-to-play-with-it computer, and it slowly went to being my main computer because of the stability, security, flexibility (and the fact that it still runs my old not-TWAIN-compliant, not-Vista-supported scanner!). I upgraded to Intrepid on the first day, and had a problem with the upgrade, so had to install from CD, and now I’m having to find and tweak all my settings and install some stuff from source (like a reasonably recent version of FreeMind). Next time, I’ll hold off on the upgrade for a month or two; I’m too dependent on this box to leave it down for more than a couple of days. My Vista laptop has become little more than an email machine and a PowerPoint/Impress projector driver.
“My faith in open-source software has taken a severe hit. There are always little bugs that you have to get familiar with….”
I have to say that I really take issue with this particular part of your “review”. I’ve NEVER installed any OS that isn’t full of “little bugs” and I’ve been computing since the Commadore 64 days. That’s just a fact of computer software. At least with F/OSS the problems are acknowledged, and for the most part fix considerably quicker than any Proprietary Software I’ve used. I would hate to think that you’re basing your opinion of F/OSS on one disto’s , one revision of it’s OS.
While I’m not all that thrilled with ‘Kubuntu’s Ibex’, in my opinion, there have been alot of hits and misses in Kubuntu’s history. So, I fix what I can, if it’s to broken for me to use, I just revert back to the previous version ‘Hardy, in this case’ and wait for them to get things corrected.
I’m of the opinion that unless I’m “actively” involved in the development or have paid money for the product, I don’t have a lot of room to bitch. After, they are doing me a huge service by providing these products. but that’s just my opinion. There are multiple choices in this instance and F/OSS is simply one of them. There always Vista or Mac, but I personally, don’t like them and cannot afford them.
Install 64bit OS is BS and has almost no benefits.
Where have you been for the last six months?
Ubuntu is a very public product. You had full access to 8.10 at every stage of development. The way open source works, especially distros that have fixed release cycles is through the public reporting bugs before the major releases, during the alpha/beta stages.
I’m definitely not suggesting for a second that all of your bugs would have been fixed had you reported them — the performance one wouldn’t because that’s down to the new kernel’s scheduler and effects all distros on 2.6.27 — and perhaps none of them would have been, but until the bug is reported (and/or there are enough people reporting it), devs won’t fix the issue.
Try getting involved in the next release by testing the Alphas and reporting some bugs.
I would suggest reporting all of these to Launchpad now but I wouldn’t expect them to be fixed (and released) for Intrepid because none of them are security issues.
@6205: Yeah no benefits… Apart from supporting more than 3.5gigs of RAM.
I had some problems regarding the sound system in Hardy and reported as bug on Launchpad, even I found a way around. They seem to be resolved in Intreprid. I upgraded my system and that given me some minor problem, which I solved quicky, but reported them on Launchpad too. I have not wireless card, so I can not say anything. Ubuntu is not perfect, but for me is good, so I use it. If it is not good for you, use something else. Oh and if you want to be very sure and safe, do this: keep your old and working installation, make room for the new one, and install as dual boot. If you have problems with the new version, you have also the old working system. This is valid also for testing another GNU/Linux distributions. Keep what works for you and test if something else is better.
I install 8.10 the same as this person did. Boot CD and installed without doing the live session. It was installed on my son’s XPS 1530 laptop. Actually did in on a trip with no internet access. Made a change to the menu.lst file so his touch pad would work. Installed just fine. When we got it a place we could connect to the internet I proceeded to install the nVidia drivers. Installed without a hitch. Installed Compiz and that too work without a problem. Granted there are things that need to be tweaked, just like every install of Linux, but it was easy to install. Not sure why this person had such an issue. Of course after reading the first couple of lines I just took the rest of the issues with a grain of salt. Maybe a Mac would be an easier choice. Sorry but thats one of the things I like about Linux. The challenge to make it work.
I’ve posted a follow-up article, predictably titled “11 things I like about Ubuntu 8.10″:
http://bigbolshevik.blog.friendster.com/2008/11/11-things-i-like-about-ubuntu-810/
I also respond to many of your comments, which I’d like to thank you all for posting.
Similar problems with wireless and overall performance. I went back to 8.04.
in my laptop (compaq v3117la, 512mb, sata disk, amd sempron 3400+) the command
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=50M count=1
reports 264 MB/s. The same command in P4, 1.8Ghz, 512Mb, Ide disk, FC5 reports 32GB/s
He is just ranting. Chances are he never used any Linux distribution as a primary operating system his entire life. All of his 9 points are ridiculous. I have installed Ubuntu 8.10 on laptops and various desktops of various architectures without a hitch. The wireless (for the laptops) worked flawlessly. The audio had no problems. Sure, the theme is not as great as it could be, but looks are just about opinions: Just change it! If you have performance issues that also seems that is your problem, after all, you did configure it properly, right? :p
Linux has been my primary operating system since early 2006, with Ubuntu Breezy. For almost a year it has been the only operating system on my computer.
I find it insulting that you said all my points were ridiculous. The default theme is a minor issue. Flaky wireless is a major issue since it was working before (and works now again with the Aircrack driver). Broken audio is an annoying issue for six months, but unacceptable to live with for two releases. For new users, the inability of Hardware Drivers to install the graphics driver automatically is pretty bad; the alternative is to download the Nvidia installer and shut down the X server in order to run it. I’m disappointed that Nvidia expects Linux newbies to do this BTW.
Having to fiddle with Xorg.conf again is very bad too. A couple of years ago, you fiddled with an existing Xorg.conf file. These days, there’s so little in the Xorg.conf file that you have to look up what parameters it takes and basically craft sections of the file yourself. That’s why Screens And Graphics was going to be so useful, right?
Anyway, if you still don’t believe that I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary system for years, then why not look in the blog archives and check my posting history on Ubuntu Forums (username is 3rdalbum).
at least you could get it to install, i have a pile of cd’s here i will now have to use as coasters, couldnt get 8.10 to install on d600 i/o errors (different reported on every cd)
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