So far this seems reasonably similar to 7.04/Feisty except with a few extra bugs. Mind you, compviz-by-default never actually happened on my desktop, so I seem to have missed one of the two key features (the other one being improved X config, which I simply haven’t had a chance to try).
Overall, I found Feisty less buggy than I’ve found Gutsy. Gutsy is not quite as bad as Edgy, but for me it’s been the second most problematic Ubuntu release.
Another problem with comparing is that both my machines broke for non-Ubuntu related reasons and have been completely replaced (bar two hard drives) since then. So with some of these things it’s hard to directly compare, particularly on my laptop, which I almost immediately started testing Gutsy on. Maybe everything would have been just as bad under Feisty, if I’d been using it on these machines.
Reported bugs:
- 151146: my home server (which is just a new desktop) won’t boot into gutsy’s kernel.
- 151786: the server’s networking broke on upgrade because a particular upgrade script entered the network interfaces into the relevant file twice: once in lowercase and once in uppercase. This one took a while to track down too. find -type f /etc | xargs grep eth0 returns a lot of results on a system that was originally some variant of Debian (maybe sarge while sarge was still in testing?) then Ubuntu 4.10 and upgraded from there. Network and driver management has moved files a bunch of times since then.
- 153119: microphone recordings sound like they were produced underwater while locked in a lead box.
Fixed bugs:
- 131133: Sound didn’t work on a bunch of new laptops with Intel chipsets for quite a while. It still doesn’t for some people, check the wiki for various workarounds, backports and bug reporting help.
I haven’t reported several bugs, mostly because I’ve lacked the energy and time to come up with a good description of the symptoms and possible triggers (for these kinds of bugs it can take as long as an hour, and then there’s rebooting your machine every time the developer has a new theory):
- NetworkManager is incredibly unstable, much worse than Feisty (although recall that it was Feisty on different hardware). When I come back from suspend, it has about a 50% chance of locking up so hard that I have to send it SIGKILL and restart it. This has sometimes, I think, occurred without suspending when I’ve switched networks, but it’s hard to tell because I have suspend-on-lid-close turned on, so I end up suspending it in order to change seats sometimes.
- Suspend on lid close doesn’t always work.
- The installer (Feisty’s) gave me so little swap (about 700MB against 2GB of RAM) that quite often hibernate refuses to work because it doesn’t have enough free swap.
- gnome-typing-monitor doesn’t count time suspended or hibernated as time not spent typing (it seems to freeze its timers entirely). So I can start my laptop back up and be asked to do a break within a few minutes, even if I had it off for hours and have just started typing again. This may not be new in gutsy, but I sure have noticed it much more recently.