[Nottingham] ubuntu 8:10 - the 'yawn' version

[Steve Caddy]

tony atkins wrote:
> just had the misfortune of installing the unimaginative - dull - boring -
> call it what you will Ubuntu 8.10

Would you like to say a bit more why it's "dull" and "boring", and why you
feel the need to express such negative feelings about it?

I wouldn't expect any version upgrades to be particularly exciting, just a
load of newer versions of components tested and packaged together. Ubuntu 8.10
does exactly this. Remember that 8.04 released with a beta version of Firefox
3. For people who want to install Linux without the need to upgrade their web
browser before doing anything else, 8.10 is generally a good thing. There's no
point distributing Linux with 6 month old components, and leaving the user to
upgrade things to current versions.

I'm not saying there aren't problems... for anyone who had a launch button on
their Gnome bars that referenced $HOME will have discovered that it isn't
referenced correctly any more (notably impacting on Wine, which installs with
a "Browse C:" launcher, which worked under 8.04, and breaks under 8.10 until
you install the patch, or fix it yourself). But these problems aren't
necessarily the fault of Ubuntu... more likely down to more recent releases of
Gnome, which seems to have some "careless" bugs in it, but nothing that a few
minor patches won't fix, and just about everyone is used to downloading and
installing upgrade patches these days.

When all is said and done, 8.10 isn't a long term support release, it's just a
regular update, it isn't anything to write home about, and it's faults aren't
that serious. To go on to say that anyone who says this is a good thing
deserves community service is silly. What did you expect? The Moon on a stick?

Steve

-- 
Steven M Caddy, MEng ------------------------------------------------------
Email: steve.m.caddy at ntlworld.com