Upgrades sometimes flawed

[Corey Burger]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 8:21 AM, George Borusiewich
<v.g.borus at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> I wrote a rant yesterday about linux upgrades occasionally introducing
> problems which weren't there in an earlier version. Several people
> responded, some sympathetically, some not. One response was to stay with
> the earlier version that worked. If everyone did that, then there would
> be no need for newer (improved?) versions. My sound card, which worked
> in Ubuntu 6.04, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, stopped working in Ubuntu 8.04. I
> tried to get it working for 6 months, with no luck. It didn't work in
> Ubuntu 8.10 either. I switched to Linux Mint 5, and with luck, got my
> sound card working. Upgraded to Linux Mint 6. My floppy drive stopped
> working and the sound work-around that I used in Mint 5, doesn't work in
> Mint 6. (Linux Mint uses Ubuntu as its base, but is more elegant). I am
> dual-booting with Windows XP,  and both my soundcard and floppy drive
> are still working under XP.  I am not helpless, but I am limited in my
> knowledge of linux. On one (floppy problem) forum, the advice was to "go
> into etc\fstab", and add something (I forget what). I opened "computer,"
> opened "filesystem," opened "etc," but couldn't find "fstab." Now what?
> Should I have to waste countless hours correcting problems that didn't
> exist in earlier versions? May I suggest that some of you geeks check
> the forums to see how many other noobies are as exasperated as I am?
> George Borusiewich

Hardware sucks. Companies are cheap. There are thousands of types and
millions of models of bits and pieces to test. The end user (meaning
us) gets nailed with this all the time, as the QA task is simply too
large for any one user/company/etc.

99% of the time, upgrades break nothing. Unfortunately, the 1% that
they do gets a lot of press, because nobody writes posts to mailing
list and forums saying "Upgrade worked. Nothing changed).

All of that being said, the honest answer is that in the case of
Ubuntu, there is little Canonical or any other company can be doing
that they are already not doing. New versions of Ubuntu go through
fairly extensive QA. Proposed updates to stable versions do the same.

How can you help? Grab one of the later alphas or the beta and try it
out on your computer. Make certain all of your hardware is working. If
it isn't, file a bug. If it is a regression that affects enough
people, it will get fixed before teh final release or shortly
thereafter.

Anyway, sorry I have no good answers for you,

Corey