David Baron's Weblog

I got a new laptop two weeks ago, and I decided to install Ubuntu on it rather than Fedora. I've been considering this for a long time, as each new Fedora release breaks yet another major subsystem of my machine. For example, Fedora 8 broke audio (in multiple ways) and broke connecting to the secure wireless network in my office, never mind shipping with an installer that didn't actually work. Fedora 7 was also one problem after another, plus the big proprietary video driver problem that I should have known about (and not upgraded in the first place) but could work around in really ugly ways (see also my first, second, and third video driver blog posts), plus having to figure out whether the packaging disasters were the cause of my suspend+resume problems (they weren't). Colleagues kept telling me that Ubuntu just worked when it was installed. This did actually turn out to be my experience installing it on my new ThinkPad. Beyond that, I'm not particularly excited or upset about the change from the perspective of a user; some things are better and some things are worse.

My hesitation over switching to Ubuntu (and the reason I didn't switch much sooner) came from seeing bugs over the past half a decade or so (fewer in the past few years, though) related to how Mozilla was packaged on Debian, and from looking through the diffs in Debian's Mozilla packages, and I think Ubuntu's as well. (Ubuntu is based on Debian.) I saw patches that were obviously written by people who wanted to fix one particular bug, but didn't particularly understand the code they were modifying or what else their modifications would break. Given that, today's security advisories from Debian and from Ubuntu didn't surprise me very much. I had a pretty good idea of the tradeoff I was making when I was switching from Fedora to Ubuntu.

Fedora as a project seems to have a pretty healthy community that, at a local level (changes to a particular package), strikes a pretty good balance between getting things to work and doing things right. Their developers are often good about contributing patches upstream, and are major contributors to many of the projects that they depend on. I haven't observed this volume of upstream patches or major contributions from Debian or Ubuntu. I suspect they attract developers whose patches are often not good enough to be accepted upstream, and I suspect the projects nevertheless encourage those developers to fix particular serious (and sometimes not-so-serious) bugs. However, fixing a set of serious bugs before shipping is an important part releasing software, and I don't think Fedora has done this well the past few releases. But bugs also need to be fixed correctly -- with a good understanding of why the changes are being made, and what they could break. That often requires sending the patches upstream to the developers who wrote and understand the code being patched. This seems to me to be the big weakness of Debian and Ubuntu (and also occasionally a problem for Fedora as well, but not as much)

I'd love to see a Linux distribution that is good at both shipping releases at a high quality bar, and at using only a limited set of high-quality local patches that are quickly pushed upstream rather than doing extensive and long-term patching of code that they don't understand. I haven't found one yet.