Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron? Hardly

[zridling]

Sam Varghese takes the newest Ubuntu release (8.04) to task for its buffet of completely annoying bugs that have been patched elsewhere. This is the problem with sticking to fixed release schedules, something that Red Hat doesn't hold Fedora to, nor do most other distros. So if you're installing it on a laptop, beware as usual.

If you're installing it, share your experience.

[Lashiec]

Yeah, as soon as it was released, the forums were boiling with people complaining about the bugs. I understand Canonical has to meet some deadlines, but being a LTS release, it couldn't hurt to push the release date one or two months in the future, they did that before with 6.06, now they're confronting serious problems and something as strange as having beta software acting as the default browser. At least they didn't make KDE 4 the default desktop for Kubuntu.

Well, let's wait for SP1

[Edvard]

Oops, I didn't see your post when I made mine.
As you can read, I opted for the Windows install at work, I'll keep you posted on my install at home.
Too bad I don't have a laptop to burn...

[MrCrispy]

And people wonder why Linux is still not a desktop OS of choice? I know its just one distro but its probably the most visible one and recommended for people new to Linux.

[urlwolf]

I upgraded to 8.04 (andlinux) and it borked anything java-related. In my case, netbeans, which is a must.

Working under linux warrants you will be losing about one day of work per week chasing bugs and googling config files, at least in the initial period. The TCO of linux is that: time.

Still, it may well be worth it (once it's properly configured in a mythical day called tomorrow).

[Dormouse]

OSX had lots of problems when it launched and various versions have had their own issues. Vista is still being avoided by people wanting productivity.

The recommendation for productivity has always been not to switch to a new version until you know it all works as it should. Usually at least a revision or two down the line. A lot of corporates are still running on NT/2000, though most have decided that XP is stable enough now. Not an issue about Linux taking more time or not being a desktop OS of choice. No sensibly run production environment would have installed 8.04 immediately on its release.

I have one installation of Vista (and it will be the only one ever). I have one installation of 8.04 (which is actually doing what it needs to do). But the rest are XP Pro & 7.10 and it will stay like that until I know an upgrade will do everything we need reliably (and I am just talking about a home network here). If I had just the one machine, new stuff would only go on in virtualisation mode.

We just have to be realistic here; new versions of nearly everything tend to have bugs. And the more new big features there are, the more bugs there tend to be.

[zridling]

Software should be released when it's ready, not to meet a deadline or schedule. (Hint to Microsoft: don't "rush" to Win7 just because of Vista's bad press.)

Some say until it becomes a game platform, Linux on the desktop won't take off. But at this point, I'd rather do gaming on a console. Seems cheaper than the [PC] videocard power needed these days to run the best games. Fortunately, I never turned on to Ubuntu, despite testing it over and over.