The Good & Bad OpenGL Drivers On Linux

[Awesomeness]

For Arch users (if they pay attention to archlinux.org news), Gentoo users, or Fedora users via fedup... I agree, no brick-age. But the forums seem to be saying Ubuntu upgrades go straight to hell

I wrote ?properly supported?. Ubuntu is a pile of shit. Always has been.

[Awesomeness]

Except for installed software. Mint allows backing up the software selection, but that only affects packages from the distro repositories, so any software that are installed outside of the distro package manager (games, self-compiled packages, etc.) need to be reinstalled manually.

Mint is just a remix of that pile of shit called Ubuntu. Mint is made by people who can't support a whole Linux distribution and built on a weak foundation that is another badly supported distribution.

[dee.]

Mint is just a remix of that pile of shit called Ubuntu. Mint is made by people who can't support a whole Linux distribution and built on a weak foundation that is another badly supported distribution.

Mint is a great distro, regardless of the mistakes Canonical is making. Reuse of code is a main advantage of open source, it's only sensible to base on another distro and not reimplement everything at every turn.

Besides, there's some nice features that come with basing on Ubuntu, such as ppa's. Mint takes that and strips away all the stupid shit, and replaces it with smart things, like Cinnamon/Mate, MDM, etc. It's like Ubuntu without all the stupidity.

Sadly, with the way Canonical is going, it may not be feasible to base on Ubuntu for much longer... that's not going to destroy Mint though, if it becomes too hard to keep basing on Ubuntu, they'll just rebase on something else... there's already LMDE which is based on Debian.

[Awesomeness]

Mint is a great distro, regardless of the mistakes Canonical is making. Reuse of code is a main advantage of open source, it's only sensible to base on another distro and not reimplement everything at every turn.

Your are partially right: It is OK to base on another distribution but it should at least be a good one. My experience with Ubuntu is, and you and Ericg seem to confirm it, that things break on upgrades with Ubuntu-based systems.
There are userfriendly distributions that build on another base that work well. Korora, for example, is Fedora with some userfriendly tweaks.

Besides, there's some nice features that come with basing on Ubuntu, such as ppa's.

Since when are personal repositories and invention of Ubuntu?

[chrisb]

For Arch users (if they pay attention to archlinux.org news), Gentoo users, or Fedora users via fedup... I agree, no brick-age. But the forums seem to be saying Ubuntu upgrades go straight to hell

Sure.. Upgrades only break on Ubuntu, every other distribution is perfect.

[chrisb]

Since when are personal repositories and invention of Ubuntu?

Wasn't Ubuntu the first distribution to provide a service that builds and distributes binary packages uploaded by any user in a personal repository? You could always do the same thing with, say, Debian but you were on your own, it wasn't an officially supported service for all users (non developers)

[dragonn]

Flame about ubuntu in a topic about graphic driver on Linux? Really -.-

[Ericg]

Sure.. Upgrades only break on Ubuntu, every other distribution is perfect.

For anyone who's curious about that link but didnt actually CHECK those bug reports...


First one, video broken after upgrade ---> Solved by reinstalling kernel package. Some module was probably corrupted, or maybe he was using the closed source AMD driver and it didnt get recompiled, either way, it didnt hose the system.

Next link is about broken touchpad, which if you look at the bug report is related to GSettings true/false value may be being switched. A bug, yes, but fairly minor.

Next one says "Its alive!" and it talks about a "rocky" start with fedup such as curl errors and downloads taking forever... curl errors could be a network problem (I cant use curl at my college on their network, theyve got it blocked somehow apparnetly). Followed by a download taking FOREVER according to him (hours) He doesn't mention what his network speeds are so if he's on a really slow connection or has a really bad connection to the router...it explains that. He also mentions dropbox repo not being prepped for F19... not fedoras fault. Next point he says mentions Catalyst having a bug... not Fedora's fault for catalyst bugs.

Next links all talk about broken touchpads (they all seem to link back to the one above, so ignored.)

The last link on the first page is about a the notification area of Gnome Shell being broken. User re-replies with a statement saying it seemed to be the theme he was using's fault as after he changed the theme he stpped hitting the problem.



No, chrisb, everyone else ISN'T perfect. There will ALWAYS be bugs to be fixed. My point was that in comparison to the other distros Ubuntu was lagging extremely behind in quality control OF the upgrades. Arch'ers are told point blank that you need to check archlinux.org every few days to make sure your next update isn't gonna out of the norm. They are also told point blank that if you haven't updated in a LONG time that you may be better of reinstalling since they don't guarentee a safe update path from too many versions of packages back.

Gentoo, same deal, you know what you're getting into.

OpenSUSE i can't speak for since I dont run SUSE anymore.

Fedora, I can attest that fedup's architecture of handling the actual UPGRADE process via initram seems to be working out very well. Maybe next release it wont be, but so far it seems to be handling itself well.

Ubuntu.... read the comments by other posters. From the sounds of it, not so much. I tried upgrading Ubuntu ONCE and it hosed the system, after that I just reinstalled every time.

[Ericg]

Flame about ubuntu in a topic about graphic driver on Linux? Really -.-

It started with how hard it is to get upgraded graphics drivers on Linux, then transitioned to how Ubuntu doesn't upgrade its graphics stack, then to "Well just use the latest Ubuntu", then has since transitioned to how finicky it is to UPGRADE Ubuntu vs reinstalling to the new version.

[chrisb]

For anyone who's curious about that link but didnt actually CHECK those bug reports...

Try this link. Or this one. Pages and pages of results from the Fedora forums of people who had failed upgrades. And just to show that I'm not picking on Fedora, here's Debian.

No, chrisb, everyone else ISN'T perfect. There will ALWAYS be bugs to be fixed. My point was that in comparison to the other distros Ubuntu was lagging extremely behind in quality control OF the upgrades.
Ubuntu.... read the comments by other posters. From the sounds of it, not so much. I tried upgrading Ubuntu ONCE and it hosed the system, after that I just reinstalled every time.

The plural of anecdote is not "evidence". There is no proof that any particular distribution is any more successful at updating than others (for what it's worth, yes, distributions should really do a better job of tracking this stuff). Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, and there are many PPAs from which users install random packages and versions, so there may well be more upgrade failure reports than some other distributions. It's possible. But that's not proof.

The fact is that the upgrade problem is a hard one, especially coping with random packages that users may have installed, or old versions that may still be present. It's a weakness of current Linux distributions. It's the reason why Android just blows away the old system install on every upgrade. I think that's probably the only way to do it 100% reliably.