The VAR Guy

I like Ubuntu 10.10, and thought it introduced some fantastic new features when it debuted in October 2010. Lately, however, my enthusiasm for the release has been clouded by lingering problems that remain unaddressed. Are these misgivings the inevitable result of an infatuation confronted with the inevitable reality or imperfection, or do they reflect more fundamental problems with Ubuntu as a whole? Read on for some thoughts.

It’s true: even after using Ubuntu 10.10 for 10 days, I remained pretty impressed. Slowly, however, a couple of distinct but serious problems have emerged over the last couple of months which make it hard to love the release as much as I once did. In particular, these are my gripes…

The continuing PulseAudio fiasco

The decision by Ubuntu developers several releases ago to adopt PulseAudio as the default sound infrastructure for the operating system did not sit easily with many users. And while I was optimistic at the time that the issues with the software would eventually be worked out, they seem to have become only worse in Ubuntu 10.10.

In particular, this bug, which seems to affect many users across a variety of hardware profiles, makes video playback on a default Ubuntu desktop effectively impossible. And while the issue may be easy enough to work around for geeks who don’t mind running a few commands in the terminal, that’s certainly not something that ‘Normal People’ would be able to figure out.

Leaving aside the question of whether the ongoing PulseAudio problems are the fault of PulseAudio itself or of Ubuntu’s allegedly borked implementation of it, it’s clear that the issues which exist with PulseAudio in Ubuntu 10.10 are major, show-stopping bugs for most users. And it’s discouraging that the particular bug hyperlinked above remains unassigned.

Suspend

Being able to suspend the computer — i.e., put it in “sleep mode” — should be a given in any modern operating system. While suspend itself seems to work well in Ubuntu 10.10, however, resuming the machine is another issue, at least for me. The system wakes up without a problem about 80 percent of the time, but once in a while, and with no discernible rhyme or reason, it totally fails, forcing a hard-reboot and possible loss of work.

The fact that I (along with at least a few other users) experience suspend problems with Ubuntu 10.10, of course, doesn’t necessarily imply a fundamental flaw in Ubuntu 10.10. I like to think, however, that the hardware I’m using — a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook — should be as free as possible of issues like these.

I wouldn’t complain so much about problems related to suspend on my desktop, which I built myself using sketchy parts, including a motherboard of dubious origin from a Chinese manufacturer that has since gone out of business. (For the record, my desktop does suspend and resume without issue.) My Dell netbook, on the other hand, is built with standard, popular hardware used by a lot of people.

Moreover, the Latitude 2100 is a model on which Dell itself offers Ubuntu preinstalled — though not yet Ubuntu 10.10. The reality that even that fact doesn’t ensure flawless performance of suspend and resume on my netbook is discouraging.

The Bigger Picture

To be sure, every release of Ubuntu — just like every other operating system out there, open-source or proprietary — has its bugs, some of them quite serious. Ubuntu 10.10 is not a standout in this respect.

On the other hand, the PulseAudio and suspend issues in Maverick seem like extraordinarily serious problems that can render the computer effectively unusable for many people. On a desktop system, sound and (perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent) suspend/resume functionality are sine qua non features. I worry, then, that these bugs — and, more importantly, the fact that they have so far received little official attention — reflect poorly on Ubuntu as a whole.

Again, to be clear: I love Ubuntu, and think that Maverick is a fantastic release overall. And, being a geek, I’ve been able to work past the bugs, so their impact on me has been minimal.

For the rest of the world, however, these problems with Ubuntu 10.10 can leave users with a bad impression of the operating system. As such, they’re issues that Ubuntu developers and their partners should really work on if they want to provide an excellent user experience.

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