Opinion: Ubuntu 9.10 is beta for coming Lucid Lynx 10.4 LTS

The following combines excerpts from my posts on Ubuntu Forums and Linsux.org.

The pattern Canonical follows with its release schedule for Ubuntu is crystal clear. The release six months prior to the next LTS is nothing but a trial for new features to be included in the next LTS. New features are fine, but Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) and Karmic Koala (9.10), made me feel a bit used. I mistakenly assumed the releases were stable when in actual usage the experience was quite different.

Ubuntu Gutsy and Karmic have a lot in common as trials for new features. In Gutsy it was installing Compiz by default and activating it just because a proprietary driver with 3D support was installed. With Karmic it’s the use of the new journaling file system ext4, Grub 2 in a beta version and a different means of tracking the hardware config at startup to make boot times faster.

With Karmic, at the same time that a lot of people are adopting Windows 7 that features a different bootloader (Vista had it too but who used Vista?) as opposed to the old NT bootloader in XP and prior, Canonical changed to a beta of Grub2 in the same month as the public commercial release of Windows 7. This makes things confusing for some of us old-timers when something goes wrong on a dual boot system. After having the Release Candidate (RC) of Win 7 and then the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) already for two months and coexisting with Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), it came as a bit of a shock to find a beta bootloader that does things much differently than Grub 1.

It made the learning curve seem steeper too because I had to learn two very different approaches to booting on both systems at the same time. IT pros and a few people obsessed with such geeky things didn’t have a lot of trouble, but the novice user time and time again has had problems. I know, because I have tried to help people asking for help on Ubuntu Forums only to find that some of my knowledge had become quite obsolete with both OSes. There’s been a couple of threads that I participated in where the question was, “How do I get rid of Grub 2 after dumping Ubuntu and get my Windows system bootable again?”

But Ubuntu is ahead of nearly every other Linux distribution. I just gave OpenSUSE 11.2 a try on my laptop and the feel was less polished and the folks at Novell seem to be not very attentive. But the worst thing was trying to install the ATI FGLRX driver from their repository. Despite a couple of months of people complaining in their forum that installing from the repository repeatedly failed due to a checksum mismatch, nobody has done a thing to fix the problem. OpenSUSE is a hassle in other ways too once you have gotten used to doing things the Debian way.

When Lucid appears in April, I’m going to stick with it for two years or maybe just use the upstream Debian stable release. The one thing I am sure of is I don’t want to fool around with another last intermediate release before the next Ubuntu LTS two years from now.

Where Linux is going with the desktop at this point looks uncertain to me. For what it’s worth, Ubuntu has the raw numbers of total users, and is dictating what the desktop Linux experience should be. As of this moment I’m quite disappointed.

To be honest, there’s 3 computers powered up in my home right now, all running Windows 7. Two desktops with x64 Ultimate are crunching SMP2 work units for Folding@Home, and the aforementioned laptop dual boots Windows 7 Home Premium x86. Here I sit typing away on a Win 7 laptop.

As a subscriber to MSTechNet, I have nearly unfettered access to whatever OS I want to run with the exception of Apple OS X. Am I a Linux guy? One thing that’s for certain–I don’t particularly enjoy being a perennial beta tester.