Re:Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS released
by jandrese on Friday February 17, 2017 @04:34PM
(#13671886)
I generally like Ubuntu, but it has its share of problems. For example, they will prefer to keep a package broken than fix it if fixing it means a version bump. This can be really frustrating for long term releases where things are broken in really obvious ways. An example includes gmplayer core dumps instantly in Ubuntu 14, with a known issue that requires the user to either hand tweak some files or just not use it. zsh users get no manual pages due to a slight flaw in the package, which won't be fixed.
Some other things are made much harder than they need to be. Back in the old days making a network bootable image involved compiling a custom kernel and setting up a DHCP server and NFS. These days it seems to require a flock of chickens to sacrifice. Hint: you need to pass a boot option that is entirely undocumented, except for down on page 15 of a discussion topic somewhere on the internet. The README is wrong/obsolete.
Other annoyances come from the system trying to be "smart", like when you try to dump a bootable image on a USB stick with dd, only to have the operation killed shortly after start because the OS detected a new bootable image on the stick and tried to mount it partway through the write, changing out the file descriptors from under DD.
Or when you're trying to diagnose a network problem by upping an interface and putting an IP on it, only to have NetworkManager go LOLNOPE and kick you straight in the balls.
Or when the system fails to boot because some message wasn't passed from some startup script somewhere and good luck tracking that down. That's nearly impossible to debug.
Heaven forbid you select the nVidia binary blob driver for your video card and then let Ubuntu install a new kernel. Ironically the only time the kernel upgrade goes smoothly is when I tell Ubuntu to leave it alone and install the driver directly from nVidia. This is extra fun when Ubuntu is deciding to upgrade the kernel twice a week. Even more fun when you've let it partition the disk for you and it creates a 256MB boot partition that fills up after 3 kernels.
Overall Ubuntu is easier to use than the old systems, but when it breaks it takes 10 times longer to fix it.
Some other things are made much harder than they need to be. Back in the old days making a network bootable image involved compiling a custom kernel and setting up a DHCP server and NFS. These days it seems to require a flock of chickens to sacrifice. Hint: you need to pass a boot option that is entirely undocumented, except for down on page 15 of a discussion topic somewhere on the internet. The README is wrong/obsolete.
Other annoyances come from the system trying to be "smart", like when you try to dump a bootable image on a USB stick with dd, only to have the operation killed shortly after start because the OS detected a new bootable image on the stick and tried to mount it partway through the write, changing out the file descriptors from under DD.
Or when you're trying to diagnose a network problem by upping an interface and putting an IP on it, only to have NetworkManager go LOLNOPE and kick you straight in the balls.
Or when the system fails to boot because some message wasn't passed from some startup script somewhere and good luck tracking that down. That's nearly impossible to debug.
Heaven forbid you select the nVidia binary blob driver for your video card and then let Ubuntu install a new kernel. Ironically the only time the kernel upgrade goes smoothly is when I tell Ubuntu to leave it alone and install the driver directly from nVidia. This is extra fun when Ubuntu is deciding to upgrade the kernel twice a week. Even more fun when you've let it partition the disk for you and it creates a 256MB boot partition that fills up after 3 kernels.
Overall Ubuntu is easier to use than the old systems, but when it breaks it takes 10 times longer to fix it.