[geeks] Why we don't use Beta software in production...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 05:22:14PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Why?  The last Ubuntu dist-upgrade (9.04 to 9.10) was so bad that some
> reports indicated 90% of users had *some* problem with it, and as many
> as 30% had showstopper problems they were unable to solve except by a
> clean reinstall.

I don't think I've ever had an Ubuntu upgrade (ever since 4.10) that
didn't have some problem.  For a long time Miro was the program that
would cause the most pain most of the time, but more recently (9.10 and
10.04) the biggest problem areas seem to be related to pulseaudio,
particularly compounded by flash and 64bit linux.
 
> And, to be fair, this *is* beta 1 of Ubuntu 10.04.

So, I've been running 10.04 alpha/beta for 3-4 weeks.  It fixed the
hardware incompatibilities that 9.10 was having, which is why I tried in
the first place.  So far most things work perfectly.  The major
exceptions are the Ubuntu Software Center (and maybe an update fixed it,
but I gave up more than 2 weeks ago), which crashed constantly, and
something called gwibber, which also crashes all the time.  I haven't
gotten around to turning gwibber off.  

Also, pulseaudio doesn't want to restart after I run then stop jackd.
Thankfully, 10.04 reboots really, really quickly.