First off no software release is problem free. I installed Windows 7 on my laptop and it took me a good couple of hours to find a driver for my graphics card.

Secondly the linux software distribution model should have a look at. It’s nice because it can actually evolve without having decade old backwards compatibility code in it like windows dose. But still upgrading your entire user base every 6 months will come more and more difficult as it grows.

What I’d like to see is for LTS releases to be public releases and all the other ones to be sort of development releases. Of course people still want to be running the latest but that’s usually related to user applications. If I have ubuntu installed on a machine I don’t care about new hardware support in the next version or upstart or the grub version. All I care about is my firefox version and maybe pidgin, if they introduced any new features. So if we could get more backports for the LTS versions especially for the more popular software that would probably satisfy most of the users. As Laura said nowadays there’s not that much to look forward to from one release to another. So why bother?

Also allot of the problems with new releases come from hardware support in newer kernel versions. For example drivers that are broken because they haven’t been updated to keep up with the rest of the kernel development. And since not all hardware vendors fall all over themselves to offer support like they do for windows I’d say that’s to be expected.

Also I don’t think linux will ever reach a significant market figure by means of people installing the thing themselves. The proper way to do that for general public is to get the vendors to put it on their products and actually support it.

The question is: WHY? What Ubuntu is doing essentially is making the users guinea pigs because there’s simply no way that so few employees can actually QA test on so many hardware configurations and such. That is probably why I see every 6 months, Ubuntu upgrades are complete disaster for so many people. And if you really go looking through the packages, you would be AMAZED how much BETA SOFTWARE makes it into the Ubuntu 6-month releases (some of which warns you not to even use it, like privoxy). If Canonical can’t produce as good results as others for their upgrades generally, then why are they not at the very least hiring more people? I’ve seen claims of millions $ in revenues for the company. Whether or not it’s true, there should at least be a better model than requiring the unpaid users to be their testers, ever after the final release. Ubuntu is supposed to be for Human Beings right? Well Human beings aren’t guinea pigs.

Also, Microsoft does have many regular updates as well, whether Service Packs or even Patch Tuesdays, or just regular updates, if you leave on Automatic Updates.

Anyway..