> how will that help there since the bug is a gnome-panel one and will
be on any other distribution?

The panel alone is not the reason enough to switch, I wish it was the
only issue I am experiencing. Just look at the bugs I reported, and it's
not even all of them, I started feeling like reporting it is just a
waste of time.

What's worst about ubuntu is that it constantly lives in state of
regressions. Each version N issues get fixed and N new issues appear.
For example in Intrepid most annoying thing is that my sound randomly
stopped working again (it was working most of the time in Jaunty).
Hibernation doesn't work... well it "works" but when laptop comes back
my X session is killed and I see login screen. There is (or was, didn't
bother to check anymore) issue with dual monitors, I started switching
using xrandr as a workaround. Also I mentioned about upgrading. From
past experience I noticed that when I upgrade instead of doing clean
install I get far more regressions. For example my friend did ubgrade
his ubuntu (actually it was xubuntu). He had setup with 3 monitors, it
totally messed up his X11 settings to the point he had to use failsafe.

I also don't really understand some decisions made by the team. In one
release (Intrepid?) OpenOffice 3.0 was about being relased. The time of
the release was few days before official Ubuntu release cycle. At that
time also a nasty bug in intel wifi card was reported, that was crashing
the whole system. Decision was made to release that version anyway, but
not include OOo 3.0, because it wasn't fully tested. WTF? I prefer much
more OO crashing than my entire system, besides OO has its own release
cycle and it went through its own testing stages.

There's a plenty of race conditions, which causes bugs randomly appear.
I think it's due to the fact that ubuntu is a mix of random components
that supposed to work together, but they often fail.

I'm wondering why some things aren't done. I'm pretty sure there are
much smarter people than me on the team, I'm genuinely interested what
are the difficulties behind it:

- why there's no clear line between what's considered system and what's not? 
e.g. system binaries aren't in packages, and they're not updated except for? I 
really love how clear in this aspec FreeBSD is. The system binaries are only 
updated with the system, if someone wants newer version of a tool, tehy can 
just instal from the ports which will be in /usr/local (the original binaries 
are still accessible to the rest of the system, so the port won't impact it in 
any way)
- why fixed release cycles? isn't better to not set up a deadline, polish the 
product and release it when its ready. Right now all the versions feel like 
late alpha early beta releases.
- why non-essential updates to system components are commited? (those usually 
break things, why not give option to install newer version separately, like I 
mentioned above)
- why new functionality is placed over stability? I'm not trying to make ubuntu 
another debian-stable, but many features that are added look neat, but they're 
unstable themselves.

Ubuntu is great when it works...

I just wanted to give you my perspective. There was a lot of bashing of
windows in 90s and there's still some. I'm not fan of Microsoft but
after they were bashed, they dramatically improved their system. It
happened twice: first with Windows 2000 (stability) and now with Windows
7 (resource usage). Both of them in past were linux domain.

Ubuntu with its random quirks unfortunatelly still feels like Windows 98
(of course not as bad as the original, but compared to today's Windows
and Mac OS X it seems no longer be in the lead).

-- 
GNOME Panel icons (on right side) move apparently randomly on session start in 
some situations
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/44082
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is a direct subscriber.

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs

Reply via email to