Well that's rather the problem. Most people assume that "the Ubuntu team" tests everything. It's an LTS. Of course it's going to work, right?
In practice, we rely on users to test and report. There are simply too many hardware configurations, use cases and user hacks out there to assume everything will just work.
And if people are unwilling to do this before release, why would you expect anything other than a big bucket of bugs when it did finally release? So no, don't assume it'll just work. Get involved before the next release.
And all this is why the LTS→LTS upgrades aren't issued until the first point release. The .0 is still considered unsuitable for production.
As far as I can remember, there always have been problems with Linux. You just expect it because of experience.
On the other hand, saying BSD just works is dishonest. They don't target the same users and don't do the same thing, it's like saying versioning in LibreOffice is buggy while git "just works". Try to give git in the hand of your mum and tell her to version her spreadsheet with it. It doesn't make sense.
For me, Windows is the worst of them all. It's the one that's supposed to work on every machine flawlessly then you buy a new laptop with Windows 10 and it won't wake from sleep unless you open and close the lid twice and then when it does wake from sleep the wifi is broken and won't work until you reboot.
This was my experience on a new laptop from dell. And it's not uncommon, just go to the windows 10 forums and you can find people with thousands of hardware issues even on brand new systems that shipped with Windows.
What's even more sad is that I expect that kind of experience with a brand-new consumer Windows machine from the store. In the corporate world, a "clean" install is done and you don't see these kinds of issues.
Yes, my goal is not to make a * context, just answering to the fact it's no suprise people are stating "cool it works". They do so because:
- often something doesn't;
- it's nice share the experience and will help people to decide wether to install or not;
- they are not thinking about comparing it to something else like BSD, but to previous experiences of the same kind of product.
You may have heard the term "snow crash" which originally referred to CRT monitors. I have only seen a snow crash once in real life and it was on a Mac Mini.
Worse than that:
"The only things that aren't working is the webcam and suspend / hibernate, but I don't really care about those and suspend even seems fixable."
I go to great lengths to be able to run Linux, cannot live without a properly functioning tiling window manager. I don't mind that the webcam support is coming in a (couple of) year(s). As the laptop (re)boots in a couple of seconds, I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))
> I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))
What exactly is eco friendly about shutdown versus suspend where it uses < 1W? Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.
I don't think the way you run your laptop has appreciable environmental impact. The damage is in manufacturing and disposal. The best way to be eco friendly is to buy laptops that don't need to be replaced as often.
> Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.
Assuming grandparent comment is shutting down the computer once or twice a day, it should be fine, I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't going to fail from that.
That I might have invested 100+ hours tweaking & patching stuff to get linux to run properly on apple hardware. a lot of this time was spent with getting nvidia drivers to work on my macbook pro 6,1 as it has a weird EFI version. (I don't mind because I like tinkering with stuff and learning about underlying causes of problems)
Not only that, but even Microsoft can't get suspend working right across every model of laptop. I can link to countless threads on the Windows 10 forums where people are having issues with suspend, webcams, BSODs, anything you want really.
OSX isn't expected to work on any hardware that isn't curated by apple.
GNU/Linux apparently is held to the highest standards of all operating systems. Which is probably why it's the most used kernel/OS in the world and dominates nearly every market (mobile, IoT, servers, super computers, etc.).
I've installed Centos7 and Debian8 on a slightly sick laptop (display light power is dead for some reasons. ) Both system with systemd; they managed to send the laptop to sleep. every. single. minute.
> *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".
That is true. There are unexplained caveats however, such as you'd need to know, for example, not to give the full disk to ZFS, because if you encrypt it, and you're not aware you need to do an off-machine metadata backup, after a power loss, you're screwed.
Linux distros may not always be perfect on release (hell, they are usually pretty shitty on release), but I never lost data like with FreeBSD before in the past 10 years of using linux.
Hold on, are people seriously saying BSD has no issues with suspend and webcams "just work"?
I used FreeBSD as an FTP server for a few months about five years ago. I just don't see how it's better than Linux in anyway.
Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, RedHat, all have documentation that's just as good as FreeBSD, Gentoo has portage which is basically ports, If BSD was really so much more stable than Linux then it would be more widely used in environments where stability is necessary, Linux dominates pretty much every market that isn't the desktop. Sure some companies use BSD, but in the end Linux dominates because it does whatever task you give it and does it well.
BSD is great, but pretending like it's somehow miles ahead of Linux is just asinine. I'd argue it's miles behind Linux when it comes to most modern tasks.
I've got no idea of the state of BSDs running on laptops, but as a long time ubuntu user the primary things I used to have trouble with are dual gfx (i.e. nvidia+intel) and shitty wifi cards - even on LTS releases. That's something that can be avoided by investigating linux compatibility of the laptop hardware before buying it.
I always do a fresh install of any distro (my files are on a separate drive and I use links to Doc, Vids, Pics etc). I wipe my home dir and start fresh. This has been the worst Ubuntu install for me. Lots of errors and issues (software center has alot of problems). Which BSD release do you run for easy install of GNOME?
I've left Ubuntu quite a while ago so here's my biased version: I'd expect my usb wifi key not to work, to suffer to get my 9 series geforce card to run full speed, to have to fight each program independently to set up my preferred i18n configuration (English language but Italian keyboard with Italian number format and iso date format), to have to mess with dependencies to get a recent official java version running.
plus weird specific things, like at some point I had some issue with 15.04 having different security defaults requiring docker to run with some additional weird flag to let 32bit app run in the 64bit host, something which worked on 14.04 out of the box.
Alone? probably not. On the other hand, I suspect the most people who are installing Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 are less interested in LTS than 16.04. Ubuntu Server, though, may be a different kettle of fish.
To put it another way, there are people for whom 16.04 is an upgrade from 15.10 and for whom 16.10 will be an upgrade to 16.04. I'm in that camp because it's a desktop and I'd rather not wait two years for the next version of my application software.
ubuntu developers take all effort to give you a userspace with everything working together, but there simply far too many choices of hardware which will break things.
I've a skylake laptop - power management sucks in all distro because kernel hasn't caught up yet[1]
I use a broadcom wifi chip which just got their firmware merged into mainline.
I don't know how *BSDs can import support for all shiny new hardware as they are launched. (Disclaimer: I have a thinkpad edge 2010 that runs openBSD happily)
I stopped taking that blog seriously long ago. "mjg59" just spends all their time digging up stuff on ubuntu to spread FUD. They're a developer of coreOS and compete with Canonical. Honestly it just makes coreOS look unprofessional.
So many people are saying "yep, installed it and all works ok"
Were you expecting it to NOT work? This is a LTS release, I'd hope the Ubuntu team tested it enough to ensure there isn't major issue.
Not to get off topic but maybe because I've solely run *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".