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Saïvann Carignan wrote 19 hours ago:
"Developers regularly read bugs. When they can fix the bug, they assign the bug to themself and generally, it doesn't take a week before we get a update."
That's the best joke I've ever heard. None of the bugs I've commented on has ever been fixed. Bugs which are several years old still got the status "New". This Bug reporting system is just a fail. You're only talking to other users who experience the samen bugs, but you never see a developer.
Saïvann Carignan wrote 19 hours ago:
"Users in this bug report complains that this bug exist since years and years and years, but if you look at freedesktop bug in xserver-xorg attached to this ubuntu bug report, it was reported 2009-11-21. Unless another older bug exist, apparently nobody complained at the right place since the beginning."
They know about the crappy clipboard for years:
http://
That's from the X Developer's Conference of 2007.
Besides that:
How can you expect the average user to know which developer develops each part of Ubuntu and where to find the particularly bug tracking system of that developer and to create an account at all of those bug tracking systems?
For example:
Someone encounters the bug of this bug report, he encounters a bug in Rhythmbox, he encounters a bug in OpenOffice.org and he encounters a bug in The GIMP. This means the user has to know the developers of X are the one to blame for the non-functional clipboard and he has to search for the bug tracking system of X. Then he has to create an account, he has to search if the bug is already reported and if the bug isn't already reported he has to report the bug for himself and has to answer difficult questions, like "Product". Look at the bug report at this location:
http://
Look at the drop down menu behind "Product". It goes from "accountsservice" to "Xtests", there are so many products in this list, I'm not even going to count all of them and all of those products've got weird names, like "xesam", "scim", "roadster", "libasyncns" or "exempi". How in the name of [actually I really don't care in the name of who] will the average user ever be able to find the product which belongs to the behavior of the clipboard? That's just impossible. Only a very small amount of users will be able to report such kind of bugs.
The user's also got a problem with Rhythmbox, so there we go again: He has to know who's the developer of this application, search for the bug tracking system of this developer, create an account, serach if the bug already exists and report the bug. Then he also has to do this for the bug in OperOffice.org and the bug in The GIMP. You can't expect this from the average user. It's way too much hassle, it costs way too much time and it's way too difficult for the average user. It's way too technical. The average user doesn't understand this.
The average user installs Ubuntu and for the user Ubuntu is the operating system, so if he encounters any bugs, Ubuntus Launchpad is the place to report these bugs. The user doesn't know (and really doesn't want to know) who developed which part of Ubuntu. The user doesn't see Ubuntu as a distribution consisting of different application, which are all developerd by someone else. They just see one operating system, just like Windows is developed by Microsoft and Mac OS X is developed by Apple.
Now imagine Windows and Mac OS X worked in the same way as Ubuntu:
A user of Windows encounters a bug in Windows Media Player, a bug in Internet Explorer, a bug in Windows Movie Maker and a bug in Microsofts Defragmentation Tool. All of those applications are developed by another team. Now imagine all of those teams got their own websites, their own bug tracking system and there was no communication between those teams. That's the Ubuntu situation.
The user first has to find out who developed Windows Media Player. Then he has to search for the bug tracking system of those developers. He creates an account and searches if the bug's already been reported. He reports the bug and he has to answer a lot of difficult questions.
When he's done reporting the bug, he has to find out who developed Internet Explorer and he has to find their bug tracking system. This is a completely different team, so they've got their own bug tracking system, so the user can't use the account he created to report the bug in Windows Media Player. So, he creates a news account, searches if the bug's already been reported and creates a new bug report.
Then he has to do the same for the bugs he found in Windows Movie Maker and Microsofts Defragmentation Tool. This doesn't work! Microsoft's the developer of Windows, so that's the place to report bugs and there are people active assigning bugs to the appropriate team.
What does Ubuntu do? Absolutely nothing! These bug reports are several years old, but there's still absolutely no progress. Why do the users have to do everything on their own? If Canonical was a respectable company, they'd have some employees reading every bug report and then contacting the developers of those applications and discussing about how to fix these bugs.
Jackflap wrote 18 hours ago:
"This has produced the FUSA applet (which was developed for 8.10), the notification area overhaul (included in 9.04), the theme updates (9.10) and we have the MeMenu and some other stuff due out with Lucid."
This has to make us happy? Those things already worked. Ubuntu had the orange bar when booting. Then Canonical decided to change this orange bar to a multicolor bar which goes from orange to brown for the release of Ubuntu 9.04. Then they decided to put in a white Ubuntu logo on screen when booting for the release of Ubuntu 9.10. Then they decided to switch to Plymouth, so that's the third time in row they're overhauling the boot experience.
What are those people thinking? There are so many bugs which need to be fixed and they're spending their time creating a new boot experience (which you'll only see for a few seconds), changing some colors in the theme (while there are enough themes available on the internet), changing the notifications (while such notifaction only pops up only a few times a month), while it isn't necessary. It doesn't matter if the progress bar when booting has one color or multiple colors. The system was able to boot, so there was NO BUG. Before the new notification system there were also notifications, so there was NO BUG. Before the little change in theme, there was a theme which worked and many other themes were available on the internet, so there was NO BUG.
Why is something which ALREADY WORKS more important than something which DOESN'T WORK? Let them first fix all of those bugs. First of all, get the base right. Get the fundamentals working. If this works, then it's time to start implementing new features (like Ubuntu One and the Ubuntu Software Store) and improving features which already work (like the boot experience and the notification system).
Users are losing their work time after time. They write a large e-mail in OpenOffice.org (yes, some people do such things), then copy everything, close OpenOffice.org and start Evolution to send the contents of the clipboard to someone. This works in every operating system (except Linux) and users are used to this behavior. It's completely obvious this works, always and everywhere. It's completely obvious to expect this behavior in Linux and it's completely ridiculous this doesn't work in Linux. For a user it's completely obvious the content isn't lost, so a user just closes OpenOffice.org and is really surprised when he wants to paste the content of the clipboard in Evolution and the clipboard is empty. A user really doesn't know what's going on and he's lost maybe an hour of work!!!
This is something which may NEVER happen. If an operating system loses the users work, the operating system is just one big epic fail and if an operating system consist such severe bugs, fixing these kind of bugs has to be of the HIGHEST PRIORITY!!! If Microsoft'd encounter such bug they'd do everything to get these bugs fixed as soon as possible. Several developers'd be assigned to these bugs. Microsoft'd say: "I don't care you're improving the feature to search from the Start menu. That can wait. We've got some really critical bugs, which need to be addressed as soon as possible. You've got something to do tonight? I'll pay you for 300% if you can stay till midnight. We need to get rid of these bugs."
I really can't believe how Ubuntu thinks some different colors are more important than bugs which cause data loss. Mark Shuttleworth has so much money. If I were him, I'd pay the developers of X to implement a working clipboard and I paid other developers to fix critical bugs (although I still can't believe those developers don't see the importance of these bugs for themself), instead of sponsoring Canonical who doesn't do anything to improve Linux. Only thing they think of is implementing paid features like Ubuntu One. If you want to make money with Linux, then first get the base right. If the fundamentals work, then people'll consider it as an alternative. As long as the fundamentals don't work and people keep on losing their work, you'll never get more than 1% market share. People try it, loose their work or encounter any of those other severe bugs and they're gone already. New people try it, they encounter severe bugs and they're gone. You want them to keep using your operating system, then get the fundamentals right. If this works, then they'll stay and they'll start paying for Ubuntu One, buying music or software and such things.