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I recently lost a hard drive to what is (as far as I can tell) a major design flaw in the Dell XPS M1530, which means that almost any pressure you put on the palm rest gets transferred to the hard drive). As long as I was getting a new hard drive and reinstalling Ubuntu, I thought why not upgrade to the latest version? I got out the restore DVD I burnt when I got the computer and reinstalled from that disc. Then, I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex.
The upgrade process went relatively smoothly, but ever since upgrading, applications were crashing more often, there were some wierd bugs (audio was haivng trouble and choosing print in GMail crashed Firefox), and the computer seemed to be generally not working very well. Eventually, I got fed up with it and installed Ubuntu 8.04 again, which worked perfectly.
The thing to remember is that issues can be very hardware specific, so making general assumptions based on one case is usually a bad idea. Here, though, 8.04 runs fine, but the later version, 8.10, does not. That is a problem. It is still true that variations in hardware can make a difference, but a computer sold with Ubuntu, should not have issues being upgraded to the latest version.
More and more, the idea of a six month release cycle is seeming like a bad one. Having a fixed and constant schedule is great, but expecting a stable release with major new features might be a little much. I have nothing against quick releases, but until I am convinced that quality is not sacrified, I would love to see a different schedule.
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Exsecrabilus – No, but the problem is that if I did a fresh install, I would not have the codes that Dell includes.
Did you try fresh-installing 8.10 Intrepid? It’s not really the same thing when you upgrade a release and when you fresh install one (like you did with 8.04 Hardy) and comparing the two.
Linux has good hardware vender’s and that allows you to get a system that works with the Linux they test it with. The problem really is two things the first is the shear amount of hardware we expect Linux not only to support but to support flawlessly. The second problem is that many of the drivers are reverse engineered or poorly implemented. The solution of course is open hardware and a vendor committed to open hardware.
It sucks but until we get that we will have hardware problems at least we can look at Windows and know were not the only ones. Apple really has the right idea from a user experience perspective even if it is terribly freedom reducing.