Even Lucid had some problems for me--the system would hang on hibernate 2 out of 3 times, among various other minor, but honestly very irritating bugs.
My concern for the long-term viability of the entire Ubuntu project is what happens once a user's system starts notifying them that they should upgrade their distribution. Not sure if that happens for non-LTS releases or not, but eventually it'll happen. The user will click 'yes' and then be presented with an extremely different windowing paradigm without having asked for it. It's like having clicked 'upgrade' to go to Lucid and finding all my window buttons on the other side for absolutely no reason. Tech folks like you and I can adapt, but will Grandma continue using Ubuntu if every 6 months something crazy changes and she has to re-learn everything? She won't--she'll get fed up and ask for her "old computer" back, which means formatting and installing Windows from the rescue CD.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can't be both a viable alternative to Windows and Mac and also be a paradigm-changing evolutionary UI experiment. The two markets--nerds and grandmas--just don't mix, at least until the next generation or two.
I have a Lucid desktop that I have specifically avoided upgrading. It hasn't offered me an upgrade yet. I don't know if that's a bug, or if it just won't offer me an upgrade until the next LTS.
egad - please take a 100 upvotes from me. I have actually offered to pay money (it's on a bug somewhere on launchpad) for the suspend/hibernate issues.
I'm not sure if Fedora fixes this, but if yes - I'm all over it. I'm HATING have to shutdown and restart.
It's since been fixed in Maverick for me (though who knows if it will resurface in Natty, as these kinds of bugs are wont to do). You might want to give Maverick a shot if you haven't already.
I hate shutting down every time too, but since I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram on my laptop starting from hibernate takes forever, so I shut down by choice now.
Comments
Even Lucid had some problems for me--the system would hang on hibernate 2 out of 3 times, among various other minor, but honestly very irritating bugs.
My concern for the long-term viability of the entire Ubuntu project is what happens once a user's system starts notifying them that they should upgrade their distribution. Not sure if that happens for non-LTS releases or not, but eventually it'll happen. The user will click 'yes' and then be presented with an extremely different windowing paradigm without having asked for it. It's like having clicked 'upgrade' to go to Lucid and finding all my window buttons on the other side for absolutely no reason. Tech folks like you and I can adapt, but will Grandma continue using Ubuntu if every 6 months something crazy changes and she has to re-learn everything? She won't--she'll get fed up and ask for her "old computer" back, which means formatting and installing Windows from the rescue CD.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can't be both a viable alternative to Windows and Mac and also be a paradigm-changing evolutionary UI experiment. The two markets--nerds and grandmas--just don't mix, at least until the next generation or two.
I have a Lucid desktop that I have specifically avoided upgrading. It hasn't offered me an upgrade yet. I don't know if that's a bug, or if it just won't offer me an upgrade until the next LTS.
egad - please take a 100 upvotes from me. I have actually offered to pay money (it's on a bug somewhere on launchpad) for the suspend/hibernate issues.
I'm not sure if Fedora fixes this, but if yes - I'm all over it. I'm HATING have to shutdown and restart.
It's since been fixed in Maverick for me (though who knows if it will resurface in Natty, as these kinds of bugs are wont to do). You might want to give Maverick a shot if you haven't already.
I hate shutting down every time too, but since I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram on my laptop starting from hibernate takes forever, so I shut down by choice now.