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Maturity?Maturity?Posted Jan 23, 2013 15:12 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)Parent article: Ubuntu considers “huge” change that would end traditional release cycle (ars technica)
This could just be a consequence of maturity. If your revenue stream doesn't depend on new products then you're free to review the relevance of shipping such a thing as a "new product" and how often you're going to do it.
Once upon a time Linux (the kernel) would improve so much in a short time that it was worth running "unstable" versions (I recall a period in which everyone I knew ran 1.3.48 or so) just because they were so much better than the stale versions that were "stable". That's not been true for some time.
For a company that's selling software as if it was turnips, maturity is a problem. For a sensible Linux company that is selling something actually valuable (like, support or customisation) a mature Linux is good news because it's a strong foundation on which to build.
One thing that does keep moving is driver support. For devices that (unaccountably) don't have class drivers such as network cards, DVB dongles and arguably graphics cards, two years is too long. So if Canonical is serious about this they will have to offer newer kernels (or backported drivers) for those devices. Or we could bash some heads together and get class compliance from these two groups of devices on the agenda.
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Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 16:50 UTC (Wed) by eMBee (guest, #70889) [Link]
isn't updating drivers already an issue for LTS today? so LTS users should not be affected by this, and not would users that switch to the rolling release. the only ones affected might be those who switch from upgrading every 6 months to LTS, and that's assuming that LTS falls behind with driver updates.
greetings, eMBee.
Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 17:03 UTC (Wed) by redden0t8 (guest, #72783) [Link]
Exactly... this won't change anything for LTS users, it's the others who it affects.
The whole "dist-upgrade" thing is part of what pushed me away from Ubuntu. I now use a rolling-release distro (Arch Linux) and couldn't be happier.
(I should emphasize the whole rolling-release thing was only one of several reasons I made the switch, though)
Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 17:51 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
LTS releases already have the 6-month release kernels and graphics stacks backported to them, this was decided at the 12.10 planning Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/linux-generic-lts-quantal
Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 18:23 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
That's good, but the thing that really frustrates me about Ubuntu is that they don't update to Gnome point releases (except for LTS versions of course). The Gnome X.0 releases in March and September, and the Ubuntu releases provide the Gnome X.0 release in April and October (typically). That's all fine.
But then Gnome releases X.1 typically 6 weeks or so after X.0, and X.2 6 weeks after that, and sometimes even X.3, and those are chock full of bug fixes and stability enhancements. But Ubuntu never updates to those in standard releases.
They may pull back a critical fix here or there, but that's it. And so it seems that Ubuntu always has the worst of each Gnome release: they get all the new features in release X.0 without the bug fixes that went into release X.n, then they jump to a new release X+1.0 with lots more new features without fixes for those bugs.
If they start picking up the intermediate Gnome point releases in this "rolling release" model, that would be completely excellent.
Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 17:03 UTC (Wed) by crimsun (subscriber, #13750) [Link]
Indeed--and newer drivers and other portions of other stacks are in place, e.g.,
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Release/Rolling . Testing is available via, e.g., https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/r-lts-backport .
Maturity? Posted Jan 23, 2013 21:53 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
Gpu class driver, naivety is strong with you
Maturity? Posted Jan 24, 2013 1:40 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
So, if it was just the GPUs, that wouldn't be too strange, all three major vendors claim (at least in public) to have secret sauce that sets them apart and a class driver would reveal that to be largely hogwash.
But in the other groups I'm left with a lot of questions - why for example network chipsets but not storage controllers? Why webcams (hardly the most trivial devices) ended up UVC compliant almost down to the very cheapest products on the market while DVB remains an endless series of incompatible chipsets doing much the same things but all in very slightly incompatible ways?
And why the timing? Was AHCI somehow perfectly timed for an opportunity to standardise storage controllers? Is there some clear reason such a standard couldn't have emerged a year earlier? A decade earlier?
USB mass storage shows that you can crank out a standards document even if the contributors can't agree on anything of consequence. Six different ways to do either of two different things, but only six, and not sixty or six thousand. And it also shows that having done that the market explodes.
Maturity? Posted Jan 24, 2013 9:43 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"Why webcams (hardly the most trivial devices) ended up UVC compliant almost down to the very cheapest products on the market while DVB remains an endless series of incompatible chipsets doing much the same things but all in very slightly incompatible ways?"
This may be a rhetorical question, but I'm answering it anyway. Microsoft decreed that webcams had to implement UVC to get its' "designed for windows 7" badge.
Maturity? Posted Jan 24, 2013 12:12 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Microsoft decreed that webcams had to implement UVC to get its' "designed for windows 7" badge.
Does that mean the the only webcams you can confidently assume to be Linux compatible are those with 'Designed for Windows 7' written on them?
That amuses me.
Maturity? Posted Jan 24, 2013 21:31 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is indeed correct. I recommend precisely this for people asking about advice on buying compatible webcams. This sort of thing is why market share is actually important.
Maturity? Posted Jan 25, 2013 5:01 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Market share, and the fact that Windows runs on a huge amount of diverse hardware and Microsoft does not want every hardware manufacturer to ship CDs with proprietary buggy drivers that destabilise the OS, any more than the Linux people do. (Perhaps Microsoft did encourage it at one time, but seem to have seen the light.) It's simply easier and more reliable when the "standard" driver is already in the OS and the device obeys the standard. Sometimes interests converge.
Maturity? Posted Jan 28, 2013 12:25 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Yes, they did, but that just brings us back to the same question. ie Why UVC standard webcams, but custom drivers for DVB?
In the past I have given the same advice to people that rahulsundaram mentions below, I'm aware of how this came about and there are plenty of examples, Microsoft also effectively mandated AC97 and HDA, and I think they had some influence on the AHCI situation. But again, why these things and not everything else?
Did somebody at Microsoft consciously say "Oh, we need to standardise webcams, but DVB doesn't matter" ? I'm guessing no. So how did we get here, and what can we do to improve things?
Maturity? Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:17 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Most webcams now ship built-in to computers and so compatibility with the Windows logo program is important. Most DVB devices don't.
Maturity? Posted Jan 29, 2013 16:08 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
That would almost make sense as a reason, except that also built-in to computers are loads of NICs, which still don't have class compatibility even though they've been around since the metaphorical stone age of ISA cards
The driver for something like a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet chip slapped onto a mid-range home PC is nothing very clever and gives no signs that the hardware is clever either (not to say I could build one, I suck at digital electronics and am a danger to myself and others with a soldering iron).
Having a class driver for NICs (even just for wired NICs) would make a lot of people's lives easier, probably even Microsoft's but it hasn't happened even as NICs went from an obscure add-on card you could buy from a specialist to a standard piece of equipment that draws attention for being absent from devices like the MacBook Air.
Maturity? Posted Jan 29, 2013 16:14 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The low-end NIC market's mostly collapsed down to a handful of vendors capable of producing reasonable drivers. The same's not really true of the webcam market, which up until recently was still full of random mixtures of bridges and sensors with whatever driver the vendor either found somewhere on the internet or got out of the cheapest contractor they could fine. So I suspect there was (a) rather more incentive to go after webcams, and (b) nobody big enough to launch any kind of organised pushback against Microsoft.
Maturity? Posted Jan 30, 2013 13:57 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
OK, I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced but it's at least plausible. This does mean that disappointingly the way forward for more class compliance could be to encourage the existence of some really miserably bad Ethernet chipsets and associated (Windows) drivers so that Microsoft are driven to mandate a class standard for (say) wired Ethernet just to make the screaming stop.
Most of the utterly terrible decisions seem to have already been tried (explicit polling even when idle, PIO data transfers, making the driver do lots of bit-shuffling in software, even physical hardware that claims to be 64-bit but disregards the top 32 bits silently has been tried already) so I'm not sure what we'd have to do to really screw things up, but I have confidence that somewhere at an IHV there is a programmer who is stupid enough to invent something so terrible it can bring about the bright new world that I hope for.
Maturity? Posted Jan 30, 2013 14:36 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] It seems to me that there really isn't enough undercutting room in Ethernet card prices any more for a new really terrible, but cheaper-than-status-quo, chip to make any inroads.
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