On 21st august, many ubuntu 6.06 LTS users worldwide were faced with a command line prompt rather than the neat gnome based brownish interface which they had quickly learned to love. The reason was of all things… a buggy OS update. Here are my comments on this episode.
- Ubuntu and the hundred other linux distros have a lot of work to do before they can seriously challenge the dominant market leaders… windows xp and mac OSX. Of course the distros are getting better and better with each release. Better performance, tons of open source apps, low ownership costs (free in most cases), low system requirements etc. But there are still a lot of things you can’t really do painlessly like playing DVDs, connecting to wireless networks or syncing with mobile devices.
- Linux has still not reached the stage where an average desktop user familiar with XP or OSX can quickly adapt to. Why should a user be expected to type in a bunch of Unix commands to simply get the DVD working?
- A corporation backed distro like UBUNTU gives confidence to people who have probably been toying with the idea of having a rock solid, free OS installed on their systems for standard tasks like net browsing, email and office productivity suites. But when a buggy upgrade causes your system to not boot to the graphical UI and instead leaves you at the command line… it makes you wonder – If heavily funded linux distros like these can commit major system errors, then what about the hundreds of free community backed ones? From a logic point, they should not be considered at all!
- Although this episode was a scary one for many ubuntu users and for others who are thinking of making the linux switch, I personally feel that it’s still worth continuing with this OS. Why? The level of support. The moment reports of the buggy update flowed in, the company was super prompt in issuing an apology and more importantly… a quick fix. This kind of turnaround time is missing from even major corporations! It gives confidence. While there’s no excuse for releasing a buggy system update to thousands of users, they still handled the disaster recovery admirably.
So.. would I still consider installing Ubuntu on my spare PC? Sure. But as a safety measure, my backups will now be daily rather than weekly 
