Gutsy release overall quality and regressions

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

I'm not sure wheter this is the appropriate place, but after I've fresh-installed Gusty - or upgraded Feisty to Gutsy - on 7 different systems (1 server, 4 desktops, 2 laptops), I have felt quite disappointed with this new release, as each installation or upgrade on each machine brought me its host of bugs and regressions from Feisty.

So I felt the need of opening this "bug report" for overall release quality and report most serious trouble as a whole "distro bug".

To make it plain and simple, Feisty worked like a charm on every machine I used it on, while Gutsy broke something important - or at least annoying - on each and every machine I tried it on.

The only improvement that matters to me and that Gutsy brought over Feisty is that, one one laptop, I now have support for the included SD/MMC card reader where Feisty didn't see it at all.

To be honest, I have mostly tested and used the KDE flavour (Kubuntu) and not much the Gnome flavour (Ubuntu), so I cannot tell whether there are significant improvements in the Gnome area.

For the rest... Trouble.

Among the most serious or annoying bugs I fell upon :

- Kubuntu's adept_manager is simply not up to the job of upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy (where Ubuntu's tool does it quite well). adept_manager systematically fails during upgrades in plenty of situations ; it's enough that a package upgrade tries to ask "Do I keep your old config file or install the package maintainer's new one" ? For adept_manager to fail. All Kubuntu upgrades I started with adept_manager ended in command-line using aptitude... (Bug #158043)
- Upgrading Feisty to Gutsy doesn't put the "initrd" line for the new kernel in grub's menu.lst. Seen on 2 machines. Of course then, system boot fails. (Bug #156058)
- Gutsy breaks encrypted filesystems at boot time if /usr is in a separate partition, as /sbin/cryptsetup has dependancies with libraries located in /usr/lib . Encrypted partitions don't mount, system won't boot. (Bug #139635)
- Several daemons don't start anymore as /var/run is now tmpfs but the daemon startup script doesn't find nor create their /var/run/somedaemon directory. Suffered from this for 2 daemons (sympa and dspam), seen that same problem has been reported for more. (Bug #158252 and others)
- A machine that used to shutdown plain good in feisty now sporadically hangs shutting down in Gutsy, kind of problem reported by several others (Bug #119308)
- Laptops using ATI display driver used to suspend to RAM and hibernate properly in Feisty. Now they crash trying to suspend or hibernate in Gusty. (Bug #121653)
- A machine that showed a Wi-Fi connection perfectly stable in Feisty, using ndiswrapper and a Windows driver, now has an unstable Wi-Fi connection in Gusty - using the same Windows driver, even reinstalled it - and now happens to hang completely if losing Wi-Fi link - never happened with Feisty.

What a bunch of serious regressions ! I was really disappointed seing so many pure regressions from Feisty to Gutsy on each and every machine I installed or upgraded...

Not even stating that I have installed systems for friends which I convinced to try to step out of Windows into Linux with the "easy, polished and stable" Ubuntu, friends who are now laughing at their instable system that crashes at shutdown, won't hibernate since the upgrade, etc... I know have to face friends stating I broke their system "upgrading" it, and well, they're damn right...

I would add to this the poor choice of replacing Good Old Konqueror with Dolphin as default file manager in Kubuntu - not found yet a single person preferring Dolphin to Konqueror, whether newbie or experimented Linux user.

I sincerely hope that the release of "hardy" will pay much more attention NOT TO REGRESS on so many, and important, points (Geeez ! Daemons that don't start ! Partitions that don't mount ! Systems that don't even boot !) for my confidence in Ubuntu has been quite undermined by these recent experiences I had...

[bill czermak (bcz)]

Would agree with your comments. 7.10 should be viewed as a Beta release

In my case, I upgraded my own system and stopped there.

As a professional, I would not upgrade a windows release without testing it for a few (several) months, so I was careless to assume Gutsy would be reliable in first release. The result of the Feisty upgrade being troublefree, I assumed Gutsy would be also. (Note that courageous is the more common meaning of Gutsy. An alternative meaning is not praiseworthy.. simply the result of too much food)

In my case, Gutsy properly supports 1680x1050 LCD screen, so the desktop looks brilliant. I was using 1600x1024 which was slightly out and obviously not as sharp. On the downside, yesterday I got 4 system lockups requiring the reset button.

I use Gnome as my windows manager, so both KDE and Gnome have similar problems. Besides the system lockups I have two distinct problems.

Text on the screen becomes garbled, with typically the last character in a line missing and corruption at the start of the line. When this happens it is a warning to save work and quickly reboot. Problem occurs in Firefox, Thunderbird and a terminal window running Vi

Portions of text are obscured by an invisible diagonal line at about 7 degrees, lower on the right, with text visible below the line and clear above the line. Scrolling the window causes the text to be displayed correctly. This problem is occuring frequently and is just an annoyance, as it does not seem to cause any damage. Problem occurs in Firefox and Thunderbird, not relevant to Vi. This problem has just appeared in the text I am typing now and has now disappeared as the text caused the window to scroll as I typed. I guess this is firefox

[Ludwik Trammer (ludwik)]

I use Ubuntu on my home computer and in a high school I work for as a system administrator - on 3 desktops, and 15 laptops. Feisty worked great, but the upgrade to Gutsy was a disaster. now all the systems are unstable, especially Firefox. I installed official Firefox build from mozilla.com at home, and that works much better. I'm also thinking about downgrading computers at work back to Feisty.

[liflam (lflaminio)]

I also made the mistake to upgrade from feisty to gutsy. I cannot pinpoint the problem but
I have now a sluggish machine with interminable waiting times in firefox and thunderbird.
I removed the nvidia driver, beagle and trakerd, but things improved only slightly. Thunderbird takes now a few minutes
to load and filter out the messages, while on feisty things where immediate.
With firefox the X server freeze while waiting for some page to load, in spaite of the fact that
the effective speed of my network connection has not changed. Not to speak of the fact that the nautilus from time to time
take the 90% of the cpu.

[Yan Li (yanli)]

Agree with you. I admit that Ubuntu 7.10 is the best Linux distro I've ever used. But it still need polish if you'd like people to treat it as a serious OS. I know Canonical doesn't like delay. OK, then cut features. Just don't thrash in so many new features on each release, and spend more time on fixing regressions. God bless Ubuntu.

BTW: I have been thinking whether I should buy one year support from Canonical, if they can fix my concerned bugs more quickly. Like this:
- Laptops using ATI display driver used to suspend to RAM and hibernate properly in Feisty. Now they crash trying to suspend or hibernate in Gusty. (Bug #121653)

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Thanks for submitting this report.

Since all of the concrete issues are tracked in their respective reports that are referenced here, it makes not a lot of sense to keep this report open. However, we appreciate the time and effort you make to help us to improve ubuntu and hope you will continue to submit reports when you find problems.

Thanks

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

In respective to:
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I would add to this the poor choice of replacing Good Old Konqueror with Dolphin as default file manager in Kubuntu - not found yet a single person preferring Dolphin to Konqueror, whether newbie or experimented Linux user.
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Dolphin is an additional lightweight filemanager especially designed for new users to Kubuntu (and KDE). It will not replace Konqueror, but will be an additional application.