Oh boy, this week the ‘quality’ of the biggest Linux distributions almost depressed me. Here are a couple fine examples of issues that one will never experience in the commercial software world. You see, after more than one and a half years of testing distributions, except for the times I was happily using PCLOS 2008, I wanted to try something in the long run. I got the idea that I should install a distro and usefor a longer period of time. My particular point of interest was how well do distributions backport the key applications to their aging releases. This story involves Ubuntu and openSUSE, but it actually starts with PCLinuxOS and a demonstration of what kind of problems may arise with distros that are a one man show.

So there I was, happily using PCLinusOS 2008 MiniMe edition. It is a one damn fine distribution, that is stable, has rolling update strategy and light weight. It happened however that the instant messaging network ICQ started blocking my version of Pidgin with a message that the client should be updated to regain access to their network. In the world of Windows this would have been a no-brainer, simply a matter of visiting Pidgin website, but for some reason or another PCLOS had not received an update for some time. This was problematic as I often work on Linux, but I have some key contacts in ICQ, which I was not able to reach using Pidgin. Of course I could have recompiled my own packages, or used another IM client, but those alternatives were not my piece of cake. I want to use Pidgin and I like that things “just work”. What ever the reason was, there was a slight pause in releasing updates for PCLOS and it was hurting my work.

From that I got the idea that I should give Ubuntu’s rather new Hardy Heron 8.04.1 a whirl. It was supposed to be stable, even stable enough for corporate usage and as a Long Term Support version it would receive patches for years to come. So I went on installing Hardy and using it for some days, and I was actually quite happy about it – it is a rather simplistic desktop environment and most things just work…until I started having issues with the WLAN of my IBM Thinkpad T41. After couple days of usage I noticed that WLAN was very unreliable. I would have to tinker with Network Manager a number of times, or perform several reboots in order to get a network connection up.

I started Googling around and discovered that Ubuntu had switched from Intel originated Pro Wireless drivers to a 100% FOSS alternative, and the new drivers were buggy as hell. There was some flaky workaround in Network Manager in attempt in order to “fix” the issue, but the fact is that a lot of people are now having WLAN issues with their Ubuntu setups – issues that were not present in previous releases. The Intel Pro Wireless series of chipsets can be found in  IBM/Lenovo, Dell and many other major label laptops, and the user base of such laptops must be counted in millions. What kind of an idiot includes buggy drivers to a most common PC component in a LTS release, which many Ubuntu fans have been waiting for to install? And all this after successfully shipping the Intel’s “ipw” driver for several releases. As a software industry professional, I just can’t understand who would make such a choice, just to get a pure FOSS driver to the release. I wandered to Ubuntu’s IRC channel to talk about it, but only got an arrogant moderator on my face, so it was time to dump Ubuntu again and look for better alternatives. What a shame.

My next pick was openSUSE 11.0, which I already was somewhat familiar with. It is a very nicely productized desktop environment and has some nice repositories available for backports. After installing and fine-tuning everything in place, I went on to watch a video in YouTube that a friend has sent me – Firefox crashed. Restarted it and tried a couple more videos, and got just as many crashes. YouTube is roughly the 3rd most popular website in the world, and openSUSE has managed break that in their production release (at least after some updates pulled from the repos). How on earth can that happen? Does anyone actually perform any testing on these things? Another example of an issue that would never occur in the commercial software world – no one in their right mind would ship a browser product that would crash on YouTube if they were doing it for business. And believe I know what I am talking about, as I work in the field of software development involving web browsers.

So now my hope is on the Mandriva 2008.1. I am bit sceptic about their short release life cycles, and how well will there be any backport updates available to the key applications. After all, I can never know when some IM network decides to block some Pidgin version again. I have to give Mandriva some credit though on their 2008.x releases, as they are very well productized and user friendly. Let’s just wait and see what is software component going to fall apart next time….

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