Question: Why did this email come to Ubuntu-Devel instead of Ubuntu-Announce like normal? Is this a change which means I need to now subscribe to Ubuntu-Devel, along with Ubuntu-Announce, for updates or how will this work in the future? Every release announcement in the past (new name, etc) seems to have come to Ubuntu Announce instead of the moderated Ubuntu-Devel mailing list? Any reason for the change?

Thanks,

Jonathan

1. Keep supporting non-cutting edge hardware. In various respects, support for stuff has decayed: hardware which worked fine on Hoary needs lots of messing with to work on Feisty and Gutsy. Fortunately, one may have access to Hoary’s configuration to remedy such problems, but that’s hardly an advert for the new stuff.

2. More testing. Although “the users” can contribute vital feedback, it’s a bit much to expect them to do lots of test installs just to check whether basic functionality works. Ubuntu developers should test real-world configurations – consider that people might install a new version alongside their current one – and not just expect that people are going to do a dist-upgrade (which is often said to be a nightmare, anyway). I’ll happily report problems, but it would be nice if people who actually have test hardware do the sanity checking themselves, rather than asking people to test stuff like bootloaders on their primary system.

3. Provide decent migration solutions. I’m still running with an ISO-8859-15 filesystem, so this means that making UTF-8 the default is only acceptable if reversing that policy isn’t a case of “beware of the leopard” in the installer. I don’t want my “special characters” to be ??? everywhere because no-one was interested to consider the problem. (I sometimes think that distro developers just blow away all their data and install the shiniest distro version on a regular basis – otherwise, they’d have noticed this particular problem.)

4. Carrying on from (3), not having one’s desktop configuration blown away would also be nice, although I suppose that would involve forcing the KDE developers to think a bit harder about the problem.

I’m sure that there’s a lot more, but my feeling is that Ubuntu often skips over the basics to concentrate on the shinier stuff (rotating desktop cubes). If things keep developing as they are, the next visit to the BBC will probably involve showing Ashley Highfield (and/or Nathan Barley) the contents of xorg.conf, if it even gets that far: hardly a good advert for the distro.