I wanted to follow up my prior post, “Personal Verdict on Jaunty: Glitchy,” with a brief comment. I think the only thing really holding Linux back is reliable hardware support. By hardware support I don’t mean just that Linux will run on a machine, I mean that all the hardware works and works well. There is little reason why a user should have to give up some usefulness of hardware when switching from Windows or Mac OS X to Linux. Particularly on hardware that has been around for months and even years.
For example, my experience with Jaunty. To recap:
- iSight does not work correctly, tinting everything in green.
- Microphone capture quality either left me muffled or sounding like a robot.
- Headphones crackle a bit.
- When Pidgin plays a notify sound while I’m listening to something else I get loud cracks and pops.
- Volume controls reset everytime I reboot.
- Bad experience with video drivers (which I was able to resolve).
Some rather ignorant people made comments like:
Ubuntu 9.04 isn’t for people who crave stability.
…
If you did a fresh installation, maybe you should blame yourself a bit for not checking things out first.
and
9.04 doesn’t claim to be stable that is what 8.04 LTS (long term stable) is for.
Trying to excuse the lack of hardware support as a stability issue is…well it’s an excuse. What people like this fail to accept is that a huge reason to use the most current release is that previously unsupported hardware is now supported. There’s also no reason why a user shouldn’t be able to assume a release that spent six months being developed, tested, and pruned of bugs is anything but stable. I mean, there were alphas which lead to betas and on to release candidates and culminated in a release! Oh, that’s really just extended beta? If you want stability use the release that was started in 2007!
No. The software has caught up and in many areas surpassed Windows. It has caught up in all but aesthetics to Mac OS X. It’s time to get the hardware support (and a bit more design work) in.