Ubuntu circus set to start again

Sam Varghese
Friday, 17 April 2009 07:06

Business IT - Technology

Of course, you don't need this readymade mix of dovecot and postfix. Anyone running a server should be able to install and run postfix and dovecot with ease. Else that individual should not be looking after that server. I took a few hours to do it and I'm not - repeat, not - a technical person.

Is this enough to justify a release? Lest I forget, the boot times have improved a bit and there is an incremental change to the desktop wallpaper.

A few months back, the man behind Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, made some remarks to the effect that Linux needed some tarting up. Given that, I expected some dramatic changes away from the dirt-brown wallpaper to something lively, perhaps an electric shade of blue. If things have to be beautified, the colour of dust/excreta is not your best option.

I'm pretty sure that few will agree with this but when I see releases like this I tend to think that there is something dishonest about them. Why create a whole new release if there is nothing worth releasing?

Even GNOME - Ubuntu is tied to its six-monthly releases - has started talking of wholesale changes to keep up with KDE which went in for change on a grand scale and has moved far ahead of the curve.

Why not wait for something major before releasing? One doesn't need to make Ubuntu like a drug in order to retain users. The retention factor should be due to usability and productivity. One should not be trying to push people to break their systems every now and then.

There's an old saying - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There are countless people who try to upgrade kernels and then find that some of what they had set up on a workstation has gone wonky. Proprietary drivers - and new users, a big target of the Ubuntu mania, tend to utilise these a lot - are often the casualty of a system upgrade as well.

On the whole, it's a pity because there is a lot that used to be good about Ubuntu. I use the past tense because over the last two releases (and the upcoming one too) one tends to feel that releases are made just for the sake of, well, releasing.

There are those who try to justify this frenzied, upgrade cycle by pointing to the fact that free and open source projects have as their mantra, "release early, release often." True, but that code is for testing, breaking and bug-spotting. It is not meant to be pushed out to users, many of whom turn up later whining on the Ubuntu forums that this, that or the other has been broken by a new release.

When Shuttleworth set out on this grand adventure, I have no doubt that he visualised the day when Ubuntu would be the leading Linux distribution and one that was able to pay its own bills. This ratrace to release every six months will, in my humble opinion, prove the undoing of what was once a noble endeavour.

Pray, gentle reader, what do you think?