Boy was I mistaken, samba issues, printing, all kinds of stuff that worked fine in OpenSUSE 10.3/ Mandriva / Gutsy. When openSUSE 11 came out, despite my aversion to rpm’s, yast & the lack of local mirrors, I gave it a try. I was amazed at how well it all worked out of the box. Contrary to a lot of snide remarks I got on the web, I had a *relatively* easy transition. I am still using it today on my work laptop. My home laptop I upgraded a week later and miraculously, most of the issues went away. Of course I had others, but it *seemed* less problematic. Feeling guilty about the Novell / Microsoft Patent deals, etc, I vowed to switch back to Ubuntu with Intrepid.

Once more, I get samba breakages, apps refusing to work (e.g. Lazarus compiling to GTK or QT), printing is flaky, etc. I look around and other people are complaining as well. I try to post bug reports, but there are duplicates registered already.

Bottom line?? The above isn’t a criticism of Ubuntu vs openSUSE. Its about the difference between a 6 month and a 9 or 12 month release cycle. I think the SUSE dev’s simply have more time to polish the code. I think 12 months may be too long to wait for some, but 9 months wouldn’t be too bad, in my opinion.

Also, we have to promote the use of *STABLE* vs beta software. I know we live on the edge, but the shipping iso’s should be rock solid stable. Some apps are getting a bad name because supposedly stable releases are adopting bleeding edge technology. PulseAudio gets a bad rep and not all of it is due to the authors fault. Its an easy project to pick on, but there are other examples.

Finally, I still regard myself as a bit of an ubuntu fanboy ( i still have 1 gutsy machine left at home) and its still my first choice for anybody I convert to Linux, but Mandriva, openSUSE, Mint, etc, are all improving and I believe that Ubuntu will get it together soon.

Sorry for the rambling post.

>Yes I do, that’s why there could be exceptions.

First we need to define what features are currently delivered. Then we need to check wether they are still available.
It’s a lot of bureaucracy.

Currently, the release-time has all the ‘bureaucratic’ freedom to move a release date or turn certain bugs into release blockers. They just don’t really have that user-centric POV.

>However I don’t consider features like network printing and using my CD drive to be something than can be gotten rid of.

The import thing here is not that they are regressions, but that they are very serious bugs. Complete use-cases that are not functioning.

> However I think normal releases could be month/year specified but we should keep some weeks for making sure that the release notes don’t grow too much.

Yes and no. Often time is not the critical factor here, and a certain amount of testing only happens after a release.
I personally just think it’s not possible to deliver the level of quality every 6 months that you are suggesting here.

And that all wouldn’t be a problem, if the LTS releases were any good. But they are not. Not really anyway. They usually become slightly acceptable with the second-point-release.

If there is any increase in quality control and regression control, i would prefer them to focus on LTS releases.

people.ubuntu.com/~sbeattie/regression_tracker.html

This should doubly be a priority with LTS releases.