Upgrades sometimes flawed

Wed Jan 21 18:18:59 UTC 2009

Just a bit of background first; also apologies for rant

I have worked with linux for a long time (anyone here remember the original Caldera, peanut, or corel? I remember when they were the N.K.O.T.B). I don't consider myself a guru, but I used to install most programs by compiling from source - mostly by following recipes...I still can't program my way out of a recursive loop. 

I have working in tech support in education for the last 15 years, and was a hobbiest before that. I started with an old 8088/640k in '91 with a HUGE 80MB HDD, bounced through Mac Classic OS 6,7,9,OSX, dove into Amiga Videotoaster workstations, hammered away at getting OS/2 Warp3 connected to internet, & slapped BeOS around just for fun. Just because I am a masochist, I have banged my head against all windows from 3.0 to Vista

Just because an OS is "corporate", doesn't mean the support & updates will actually fix things, and there is no guarantee they won't in fact BREAK other things. Case in point...at work, we have Mac OSX servers, providing file sharing for a mix of Windows, linux & Mac clients. For YEARS, all has been kosher..using SMB for the file share NO-ONE encountered any difficulty accessing the shares. Then VISTA (f&^K!) has a network glitch that prevents connecting, but at least MicroSerf DOCUMENTED the problem and PROVIDED a quick reg fix. All was good until September, when students started showing up with Mac OSX 10.5.5 (double-f&^K!)...which BROKE a perfectly good, ( and stock on OSX Server)  share system. APPLE DENIES THERE IS A PROBLEM!!! I can find hundreds of posts on Apple forums about this issue, which continues on OSX10.5.6, and the a$$w1pes at Apple pretend is only the user's imagination. During all of this kerfuffle, no desktop linux distro has given me
 any file sharing grief whatsoever......

In short, there is are no guarantees on ANY OS that the latest update will make things better instead of worse. Its as if the software has grown beyond the bounds of the Newtonian universe, and plunged into the abyss of quantum uncertainty...there are simply too many variables to accurately predict the result (although, in something as important as LANs & file sharing, that does not excuse either MS or CrApple for these 2 latest screw-ups)

I am also really tired of users & media who buy into this Vista is easy or OSX is easy/stable/safe compared to linux....I have YET to meet a single Mac user (they do exist; I've seen their postings, just not met in real life) who can actually fix their own Mac if something goes wrong...for all their conceit that Mac is so great, they still rely on some techie to keep it running smoothly for them.

just my $0.02

Ken

________________________________
From: Corey Burger <corey.burger at gmail.com>
To: The Canadian Ubuntu Users Community <ubuntu-ca at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 8:31:03 AM
Subject: Re: Upgrades sometimes flawed

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

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