Linux losing stability?

[Jim March]

> And some of the issues that are cited have no bearing on other distros.

Yes and no...

> *The non-buntu distros did not suffer from the Intel-hell that Ubuntu 9.04
> shipped with. (you cited that, not the OP, but still)

No, this wasn't purely an Ubuntu issue.  Jaunty had about half the
graphical stack changes needed.  OpenSuse 11.1 got about 3/4ths but
still wasn't quite right in the head, neither was the latest Fedora.
A lot of cutting-edge distros got burned during this "change period"
in the graphic stack.

> What is wrong with the graphical setup? Same problem: vendors shipping non-
> free and buggy drivers (nVidia, I am looking at you!)

Ummm...while NVidia was hit, and to a lesser degree ATI, Intel was hit
worst of all and that's all FOSS drivers.

ATI's situation is weirdest.  They've cut off support for the "older"
chipsets in their proprietary drivers, however they're still selling
those chipsets as "budget" solutions.  A friend of mine just paid $300
out the door at Beast Buy for a surprisingly decent Asus lappy, but it
came with the ATI x1200 chipset which ATI isn't supporting...while
still selling it brand new.  THAT is pretty gross.  Now on the good
side, ATI has supplied info to the FOSS community at a rate far
greater than NVidia so FOSS drivers for the x1200 (and similar
x1100/x1150) are coming...in fact pre-release versions of same are in
Karmic.  The guy that bought the cheap lappy?  I actually have him
running on Karmic, with all updates turned off so I can check for
regressions when I manually update it (he's a friend, local, and I'm
willing to spend the time on it).

Anyways.  Anyone with the x1200 is in good shape with Hardy (on
proprietary drivers),  screwy in Intrepid, screwed HARD in Jaunty, and
apparently will be in good shape again (finally with FOSS drivers!)
with Karmic.

> What is wrong with networking? Okay, okay, network manager can be a little,
> ahem, messed up when dealing with encrypted wireless networks, but that is
> because that stack is constantly in flux and being improved upon. You can
> also in some cases, again, blame the vendors, for shipping in many cases,
> proprietary drivers, or forcing users to use ndiswrapper, which never really
> worked or performed well for me.

Oh no.  Sorry.  In Intrepid and Jaunty (Network Manager 7.x series) it
was COMMON to put in a valid WPA password for a given SSID, have it
choke and then come back to you showing the "password" as a long
string of hex gobblygook when you do "show password".

Oh HELL no.  There is ZERO excuse for that crap.  If I put a password
in there, I damned well did so and nobody has any excuse for changing
it "automagically".  That's deep into the "steaming turd zone".
Debian rightfully said that was just intolerable and never went there.
 I went ahead and lived with it myself because I have a broadband
cellmodem that it could auto-detect but for anybody on
Ethernet-and-WiFi-only, Wicd was a better option.

And yeah, suspecting Ubuntu had borked the install of NM7 I tried
Fedora 10 when it first came out (about mid-way through the Intrepid
era).  Same bug, plus Fedora's usual habit of committing hari-kari due
to untested auto-updates being pushed out, in this case killing
package management entirely shortly after Fedora 10 was released
officially.  No more Fedora thanks, I'd seen that sort of idiocy
before (Fedora Core 6).  Fedora is ALWAYS alpha code, period, end of
discussion.

In Karmic I have "NetworkManager Applet 0.7.995" per "about", but
that's really release candidate 8.0, and it seems a lot more solid.

This has NOTHING to do with WiFi card drivers (ndiswrapped or
otherwise) and everything to do with

> All in all, I find this article borderline FUD.

I think the article's mistake was in failing to differentiate between
bleeding edge and stable distros.

Jim