Guest post by The new Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. are now available and include the change to systemd as the init system, new versions of LibreOffice, Firefox, Chromium, etc. The big change in Kubuntu is KDE Plasma 5 as the default desktop, and also KDE Applications 14.12.
Rabble rabble rabble systemd rabble rabble!
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Installed Kubuntu 15.04 yesterday evening. Nothing but crashes, glitches, and hassle.
I really, really want Linux to be usable as a desktop OS but the state of it is just fucking disgraceful. Why the hell can I get FreeBSD running on essentially any hardware I have but Linux just falls over on its arse every single time?
Desktop Linux is a fucking shambles. Go on, vote me down into oblivion.
What is it exactly that’s crashing for you? I just upgraded two different machines with two very different setups from 14.10 to 15.04 and the only issue I had was that it took a long time.
Repeated and unpredictable graphical artifacts on screen that form between ten to twenty seconds after logging in to KDE. These were invariably followed within seconds by a hard lockup – no mouse, no keyboard, nothing.
Figuring this was probably related to me having an Nvidia card I decided to go into a TTY and install the proprietary drivers. Everything then appears to work okay.
Or, at least, it does until I log out, restart or shut down the machine. At which point the machine pops up a bug reporting tool telling me that something has segfaulted. The problem is that since the machine is in the process of leaving the desktop session when this happens, the bug reporting tool disappears after a few seconds, long before I can report the damn bug or even see what’s causing it.
And if I reboot and then try to report the bug? The bug-reporting tool keeps telling me that my report isn’t detailed enough, even after ensuring that debugging symbols are on when the failure happens.
As I’ve said, it’s a shambles.
I upgraded from 14.10 and for the first time ever it went without a hitch. I am very impressed with this release to me it seems rock solid.
I’m pleased that you’ve had a better time than I did. But the fact that there’s so much regular variability in people’s experience of new releases says a great deal about desktop Linux in itself.
Of all the distros, I think Debian (Ubuntu and its variants) have always given the least amount of headaches to install and use.
I can only agree with you half way. Debian has always been pretty good, but Ubuntu has been intermittent at best. More often than not I’m hit with glitches that are about as close to inexplicable as I’ve ever seen and which have never appeared on any other version of Linux I’ve used. Debian’s usually rock solid where Ubuntu often feels like beta software even a year after the lts releases. I still say nothing beats Slackware for stability, but once you’ve been running it for a while it can be a living hell to maintain and upgrade.
I also have installed Kubuntu 15.04. No crashes yet. 1 single issue: when adding an external monitor, it takes very long (more than a minute) before the system has configured itself.
I’ve been using Kubuntu 15.04 since its beta 1 version in a Virtualbox virtual machine, and it has been working correctly. If a bug report is created in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug/?no-redirect
attaching the file
/var/log/syslog
and the files resulting from:
lsb_release -a > lsb_release_a
uname -a > uname_a
sudo lshw > lshw
sudo lspci -vv > lspci_vv
they can start seeing if there is a problem with a driver in a PC, for example.
Edited 2015-04-24 07:33 UTC
In fairness, I’ve found Ubuntu and Lubuntu releases from the past couple of years to be full of problems. Startup errors, applications refusing to work once updated, various problems with graphics settings being lost/corrupted. I had always stuck to LTS releases too. Reinstallation from scratch helped until it ran some kernel updates, when I started getting the same issues again. And that’s across multiple CPUs and machines – Intel, AMD and PPC, all fitted with different graphics cards too.
In the end I switched to Linux Mint about a year ago and it’s been rock solid since then. Don’t think I’ll be going back near Ubuntu any time soon…
If you’re using Mint, you’re using Ubuntu, just with some added packages, a different GUI, and a handful of patches. It uses Ubuntu repositories, that’s how close it is.
Sometimes a handfull of patches are all it takes. Just goes to show how persnickity Linux drivers and display servers really are.
Yep, I’m well aware of that. And if you’re using Ubuntu or Mint, you’re using Debian. And so on. All this shows is that it’s something particular to Ubuntu that’s causing the problems. Maybe it is the GUI package that’s been causing me all the problems over the past few releases. Maybe Unity doesn’t play well with some graphics card drivers (although my issues span different CPUs and drivers too). Maybe it’s the race Ubuntu go through to add and change features. All in all, the maintainers of Mint have somehow fixed the problems, making it a nice, usable distro which Ubuntu itself no longer is for me.
well, you’re using Debian Sid.
Been running Ubuntu 15.04 since beta2, super polished and stable so far.
No issues with the update if you are running the original repositories.
Problem is that most of them contain outdated apps that are no longer supported by developers.
This way you can either compile the packages by yourself or use the prebuild binaries from their repositories, which do tend to brake at each system upgrade.
Other distributions have problems with this because they either include alpha quality packages in their stable repositories (Fedora ..) or they lack the required dependencies.
I change the version not too often. But I always prefer to make a clean install on an other partition, keep the system multi-boot with grub so I can grab back to the old install.
I know it takes more time but it is always a good time to clean up what one tried and never really needed.
I used Ubuntu 12.04 with KDE and now I will change to Kubuntu 15.04 which will be upgraded to the next LTS.
I do not understand why people have so much problems, but I guess they will have trouble with most other OSses as well. If you prpare yourself then most updates/installs will work normally.
That’s the best strategy or one of the better ones. No updating problems, if something happens to an installation… you always have the previous one to boot with it, etc.
Edited 2015-04-24 13:23 UTC
Maybe some people are just luckier than others. I have had lots of trouble in recent years with Ubuntu, having used it continuously since 2008 or thereabouts. I don’t have the same sort of problems with other OSes, and I use quite a variety.