On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 08:56:10AM -0000, Thad Floryan wrote:
>
> The Ubuntu team has made some other recent questionable assertions and
> assumptions. I now have to manually update /boot/grub/menu.lst because
> it's no longer done automatically for kernel updates in 8.04LTS.
>
> And the wireless fiasco with the recent 8.10 release is legion.

The trouble is that they all seem to make stupid decisions. Fedora is
worse, both as far as ignoring their users and their decisions.

They call themselves cutting edge, but they're one of the few distros
that make changing password hashing to blowfish difficult. (In Ubuntu,
aptitude install pam_unix2 or a similarly named package, edit a few
files in /etc/pam.d and you're done. In Fedora, there's no pam_unix2
package, for starters.

Now, blowfish isn't some shatteringly new technology. Fedora would be
better off putting at least some of its efforts into things like that
rather than things that no one really likes, needs, or wants, such as
pulseaudio and package kit.

At least with Arch and the other smaller distros, one can easily get in
touch with developers, and unpopular decisions can frequently be
changed. (Although, perhaps because there's less of a distinction
between them, there are not too many unpopular or outright stupid
decisions.)

I remember reading someone's blog about how their 8.04 LTS install was
broken--again--after an update. The blogger wrote that it wasn't
difficult to fix, but the whole point of using 8.04 was to avoid garbage
like this.

It's not that MS and Mac updates don't break anything--it's just that
when they do, they have enough of a grip on the their market so that
people will take it. In other words, they can get away with it.

Ubuntu (and other distros) can't.



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Scott Robbins
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