Open Source Immune Efficiency. A small bug can kill.

I have been using open source software for well over a decade and have noticed an alarming trend.

Many fine software packages which had multiple collaborators and countless hours work have been killed by a show stopping bug.

The most recent chich has come to my attention is Rhythmbox.

Rhythmbox is an excellent audio player program for linux which allows music to be put in a collection and arranged using playlists, sorted and various other nice features. I liked the way it worked and was happy.

In the last six months or so I have encountered a show stopping bug. It is the sort that can bring about the fall of a program. The sort of bug I am referring to is a finger pointing bug where nobody will accept responsibility. People say "It isn't my problem, blame package X". this continues until someone says "It's an upstream issue" and the bug never gets fixed in spite of multiple reports.

I can not use Rhythmbox anymore because there is a bug which causes a crash with certain container formats. Rhythmbox, dbus and GStreamer are all involved, but the buck seems to have been passed to saying it is a GStreamer upstream issue.

Go and have a hunt. this issue dates back more than a year. many people have dealt with it the same way I have. Grudgingly using another alternative.

if people are offered a choice between a program which should do what they want but breaks, or a suboptimal program which works, they will choose the latter.

if you need to move house, would you choose a moving van with a seized motor or a fully functional station wagon? Exactly.

Sure, in this case Rhythmbox breaks because GStreamer causes a segfault. Call me old fashioned, but we used to use input sanitization. At worst Rhythmbox should acknowledge the crash, and move on to the next file.

It's not even an error during playback. Just population of the collection.

One bug is killing this mighty beast. Much like many other packages which I can't remember specifics about anymore besides leaving a bad feeling when I try to recall them.

If you haven't tried Rhythmbox I still urge you to give it a try. You may not have any files which inflame this bug. If you liked the pre KDE4 Amarok, you'll probably like this.

That's my rant for today. Agree or disagree, that's what i think.

The karmic experience: Was it just a Lucid dream?

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is now out of beta and in the wild for the general public as a finished product.

I have personally been waiting for this release since about November of 2009.

The predecessor for lucid was somewhat of an unloved child. 9.10 Karmic Koala had many new features. many of these features were not complete or did not function correctly. Karmic was not ready for release when the deadline elapsed. As a result it's entire lifespan was a torrent of updates, desperately attempting to fix the situation.

Over the last couple of days I have updated both the dual core 64 bit AMD based desktop and my 32 bit netbook to lucid to see how well it's updater works.

The update is relatively painless and almost everything still works perfectly. the updater does ask questions which the novice would find utterly daunting such as which device and / or partition to install the bootloader and whether to remove unsupported programs.

On the desktop it grumbles a little about USB on startup but everything seems fully functional which I would consider a win.

On the netbook there are a few issues such as no splash screen and a slow-ish boot. But once again everything is functional.

I would recommend doing a clean install if possible to avoid upgrade-itis.

Is it worth upgrading from Karmic?

Yes. The positives far outweigh the negatives. SMB file sharing seems to be working properly again. USB drives haven't been glitching out and changing permissions at random.

The context menus in nautilus have been expanded and integration with Ubuntu One, an online storage / sharing system has been improved.
I could go on, but I feel the best way to explain it is that Lucid is to Karmic as windows 7 is to Vista. Not a total revamp but a lot of subtle repairs and upgrades which go towards making a far less frustrating user experience.

The only complaint I have is that the window buttons in Gnome have been moved to the left. Thanks for that Shuttleworth.
It is possible to move them back with a file edit though.

i was so close to moving back to another non-Ubuntu based distribution because of Karmic. I was even trying other distributions and operating systems. However Lucid has stopped me. To be honest I only upgraded out of morbid curiosity, expecting a tragic unworkable mess. After using it for a while I was pleasantly surprised as it would seem Ubuntu's fall into decay and ruin has been halted.

I would recommend lucid to existing users and to people who are curious about Linux.
To the curious, there are live CDs available which let you try it out without affecting your system. The downlaoded image can also be put on a USB drive or SD card and optionally set up with some persistent storage so other programs can be installed and your files can be kept. great for system recovery or just taking your system with you.

My conclusion: Lucid is good. Try it.