Comment Re:Happy birthday (Score 1) 225
There are three possible meanings to the phrase
Ubuntu's got severe stability problems
.
a) A system has (more properly a "largish" subset of systems running the Ubuntu distribution have) stability problems.
b) While the machines themselves are stable, there could be significant changes in the distribution over a relatively short time.
c) The distribution has a psychosis.
I'll let others approach a and c. As for b, the distribution does have stability issues as compared to most mainstream distributions, let alone Debian-stable. I've yet to go through an Ubuntu update without having things break requiring some moderate digging around.
Some obvious things that I wouldn't have expected to happen in Debian:
Ubuntu pushed new Nvidia drivers at nigh the last moment, as happend with Jaunty. The drivers had some stability bug and the fix on launch day was to revert to an older version from the beta. Debian would never release binary-drivers with it's distribution.
Ubuntu changed configuration systems between Jaunty, Karmic, and Lucid--specifically those configuring input in X. The Synaptics touchpad on my MacBook worked fine in Jaunty. I've not gotten it to work right since but looking at the configuration files for each system shows the radically different configuration systems, and the update process obviously didn't do the Right Thing during the update since it broke. Debian would never have three named releases within a calendar year.
My girlfriend managed to update from Karmic to Lucid by herself. I had told her that it was ok to update packages as they became available, but hadn't realized how easy it would be for her to actually update the entire system to a new release. Her Eee PC's wireless networking and ACPI triggers broke forcing me to fix things that had just been working manually. Some of these came back with a reboot, for others I needed to find the "new" packages in Lucid, for others some manual tweaking, and apparently some of the buttons aren't working "right" still. I never would have had a girlfriend running Debian.
