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Steph Foster wrote: > > Having read about a lot of problems and heard a lot of complaints... One has to make an assessment, but remember if you are in a community you hear that communities problems. I'd go with your own experiences. Third party reports often omit those vital details about the daft things they did before upgrading, or the really weird hardware they own, etc. In the meantime in another place a company released a new version of their OS with 4 critical problems in their main networking protocol at least two of which caused it to crash on single malformed packet. Haven't seen an issue that bad on GNU/Linux since circa 1997 (and it was fixed in 2 hours back then I believe). Fallible humans make fallible computers. > I do say GNU/Linux because the problem is not kernel based so it isn't > really a Linux problem. > > It is a GNU problem. I think you need to be more specific, before laying it on GNU. I see a lot of kernel related trouble, but there is a tendency in the GNU/Linux community to keep up with the latest kernel. For example kernel changes broke my tape drives support when they fiddled with ide-scsi, and they broken the RAID card when splitting out one of the set of RAID cards. Install I did for someone on random hardware needed magic kernel incarnation to make a IDE CD drive work(?). An mdadm install broke due to some sequence change in hard disk recognition. My laptop lost CD support at some point in 2.6 so it now just reboots half way through playing audio CDs. All kernel, or kernel related. Whilst I thought GNOME 2.mumble (12 I think) launching without a menu editor was piss poor, much of the GNU code is pretty stable in comparison. That said the kernel changes quick to reflect hardware changes. Probably all but one of these would have been avoided if I'd just stuck with Debian stable on the machines concerned, and never touched anything but security updates! Also the X.org folk have been making a lot of structural changes, which risks breaking stuff on upgrade. Although the last time I broke stuff on upgrade the fix was to delete the old config file and let Xorg work it out. Neither GNU nor Linux lay claim to X.org foundation, but they are kind of important, and the folks there do miracles. There is also the approach to releasing software, since a lot of this software needs to co-operate with, or be built on top of each other. I think Ubuntu driving a 6 monthly release cycle have released with more real howlers of bugs that a more measured approach would avoid. But hey people vote with their feet for Ubuntu, so clearly I'm unusually difficult to please with my choice of OS. Certainly the last non-technical person I lent a Debian machine to was awed by how well it worked, how easy it was to use, and how it kept on working. Also he was surprised at how fast it was compared to a laptop running XP (which had a processor that was at least 4 times faster), but since it was mostly web surfing that was probably mostly Firefox^W Iceweasel v IE, and not suffering the usual slow down XP users get as Windows frags the life out of their registry files for no obvious reason or one of the other common slow downs (malware, IDE driver features, slow antivirus, really poor third party software). Funny thing was I was concerned about lending it to him because the boxes processor was so slow! -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html