Comment 270 for bug 1289977

> "Never happen no matter what" is asking for a magic wand and unicorns.

"No matter what" was a sloppy phrasing, agreed. I should have said "whenever it can be avoided". No need for magic wand or unicorns, just a few checks.
And here it definitlely can be avoided at least to some extend, while absolutely nothing is done to even attempt to avoid that.

> There are some things we can control, and some we can not.

And here, there are definitely things that can, and hence should, be controlled, and that are not being controlled, hence a bug.
Note that I'm always talking about Ubuntu as a whole; which part of it is responsible for doing right what is being done wrong, I don't know. It may be Grub, it may be the Grub packaging in Ubuntu, or it may be some other part of ubuntu.

Ubuntu is miserably failing to provide an easy or at least reliable way to install it in dual-boot on a system that has another OS, namely Windows 8. Following the instructions that are given during installations fails. Following the instructions that are given in the official docs fails. You're left alone either tinkering or using third party repair tools. And when you do and get it to work, a system upgrade on a machine that works breaks it. That's simply not an acceptable UX.
That's my experience. Other users have reported doing a bare fresh zero-tinkering install immediately resulting in a broken system, or doing a bare fresh zero-tinkering install which resulted in a working system which broke at some later dist-upgrade. That's something that should never happen, and here I really can say "no matter what".

Comments 55, 91, 137 report cases where absolutely no manual installation or third party tools were ever used.