Ubuntu resources vs. quality

It's difficult for all distros, but my point was that Ubuntu could and should focus more on quality, almost as a differentiator, because there are many people who simply want a very reliable, secure desktop OS with which to browse the web, do office docs, play casual games, etc. One of the reasons Windows 7 is doing well is that it works quite reliably now compared to XP and earlier, and Ubuntu needs to improve its quality to keep up.

I haven't got recent experience with many other desktop distros other than mini live CDs, so I was only talking about Ubuntu.

I use Ubuntu on various PCs but I'm getting tired of the hardware problems. On one PC in particular there's a frequent freeze that is hard to diagnose, and it's using proven mainstream hardware with open source drivers (Intel GMA3100, H55 chipset, etc). The same PC only half-works with KMS (the framebuffer hangs in Ubuntu recovery mode, though Xorg works OK).

The lack of vendor support for drivers can't be used as an excuse, as all my Ubuntu PCs were built from scratch with Linux-friendly components, and are using LTSs that are 1 year old at least, so there has been time to fix distro bugs. I've had to apply all_generic_ide and irqpoll to another PC with similarly boring hardware to stop a hard freeze, and use a non-standard kernel on a third PC to get a WiFi driver that works.

The problem may well be upstream of Ubuntu - if there was a really widespread automated regression testing of Linux kernels and Xorg, that would at least help flush out the regressions introduced by new kernels and get rid of many freezes/crashes.

Having an Ubuntu that works would be far more useful to me than going for Wayland and Unity, which are bound to introduce even more code that needs debugging. I don't have a problem with the Ubuntu cloud strategy as that makes sense and has few hardware issues, but they should really consolidate and fix Ubuntu on the desktop before throwing even more new technology into it.