> how will that help there since the bug is a gnome-panel one and will be on any other distribution?

The panel alone is not the reason enough to switch, I wish it was the only issue I am experiencing. Just look at the bugs I reported, and it's not even all of them, I started feeling like reporting it is just a waste of time.

What's worst about ubuntu is that it constantly lives in state of regressions. Each version N issues get fixed and N new issues appear. For example in Intrepid most annoying thing is that my sound randomly stopped working again (it was working most of the time in Jaunty). Hibernation doesn't work... well it "works" but when laptop comes back my X session is killed and I see login screen. There is (or was, didn't bother to check anymore) issue with dual monitors, I started switching using xrandr as a workaround. Also I mentioned about upgrading. From past experience I noticed that when I upgrade instead of doing clean install I get far more regressions. For example my friend did ubgrade his ubuntu (actually it was xubuntu). He had setup with 3 monitors, it totally messed up his X11 settings to the point he had to use failsafe.

I also don't really understand some decisions made by the team. In one release (Intrepid?) OpenOffice 3.0 was about being relased. The time of the release was few days before official Ubuntu release cycle. At that time also a nasty bug in intel wifi card was reported, that was crashing the whole system. Decision was made to release that version anyway, but not include OOo 3.0, because it wasn't fully tested. WTF? I prefer much more OO crashing than my entire system, besides OO has its own release cycle and it went through its own testing stages.

There's a plenty of race conditions, which causes bugs randomly appear. I think it's due to the fact that ubuntu is a mix of random components that supposed to work together, but they often fail.

I'm wondering why some things aren't done. I'm pretty sure there are much smarter people than me on the team, I'm genuinely interested what are the difficulties behind it:

- why there's no clear line between what's considered system and what's not? e.g. system binaries aren't in packages, and they're not updated except for? I really love how clear in this aspec FreeBSD is. The system binaries are only updated with the system, if someone wants newer version of a tool, tehy can just instal from the ports which will be in /usr/local (the original binaries are still accessible to the rest of the system, so the port won't impact it in any way)
- why fixed release cycles? isn't better to not set up a deadline, polish the product and release it when its ready. Right now all the versions feel like late alpha early beta releases.
- why non-essential updates to system components are commited? (those usually break things, why not give option to install newer version separately, like I mentioned above)
- why new functionality is placed over stability? I'm not trying to make ubuntu another debian-stable, but many features that are added look neat, but they're unstable themselves.

Ubuntu is great when it works...

I just wanted to give you my perspective. There was a lot of bashing of windows in 90s and there's still some. I'm not fan of Microsoft but after they were bashed, they dramatically improved their system. It happened twice: first with Windows 2000 (stability) and now with Windows 7 (resource usage). Both of them in past were linux domain.

Ubuntu with its random quirks unfortunatelly still feels like Windows 98 (of course not as bad as the original, but compared to today's Windows and Mac OS X it seems no longer be in the lead).