I run Hardy, Gusty, and Windows on my laptop, but the only problem that seems to happen that I cannot figure out with Hardy is that it continuously attempts to mount an audio disk, even though there is none in the drive. I have not been able to figure out this problem and it does not seem to come up in forums. If I leave my computer unattended for a while, I could expect to come back and find 10 or so error messages to close.
Other than this specific problem to my situation, Hardy seems to run fine, and in my opinion better than Gutsy. Sometimes I feel as though people tend to make these overblown issues in blogs so they have something controversial to drive traffic to their sites. These issues are small qualms that should be brought up in Ubuntu development forums, not in a blog article that disregards the OS as a whole because of some annoyances of a power user. To be ready for the mass usage, it must be easy to install, have all of the hardware recognized, and have its users easily begin to work as though they previously have. I have had three friends who I would consider to have no computer knowledge other than regular internet usage install the system and get it up and running just from the cd's I gave them, no other input from me. If these people can do it and successfully get work done, I would consider it ready. These are issues that do not apply to 95 percent of computer users.
I haven't experienced any of those problems with Hardy, but I have experienced several other issues.
There does seem to be a pattern of "Do things for the convenience of the the Ubuntu developers" rather than "Do things for the convenience of users and third party developers, so that the platform is nice and has lots of tools". They've introduced shell variables into the Apache configuration file, which is simply invalid syntax if you try to use any standard Apache tools (they did this because parsing configuration files would be too hard for their developers to handle). I've also found the network status monitor is just broken, and wifi won't start correctly on boot...I have to drop to the command line to start my wifi every time I boot up (it worked fine in 7.10 and 7.04). And this isn't one of the complicated wifi cards to make work...I bought this lappy because it has an Intel wireless chipset that works out of the box with all modern Linuxes.
So, I would agree, the quality control seems to be pretty weak in this release. And the simple fact that they willfully broke every tool but their own for dealing with Apache configuration is an abomination.
These annoyances don't seem to be all that critical. I haven't been able to use my wireless card on Gutsy since I installed it several months ago.
Last night, I upgraded to Heron and voila, my wireless card is recognized and functional.
Annoyances aside, making Ubuntu's very broken wireless driver support a little less broken makes installing Heron much more appealing than previous versions.
Funny, I had quite the opposite problem. I installed Gutsy and my wireless card worked out of the box, no config needed. But right after upgrading to Hardy, Ubuntu didn't recognize my wireless card.
I agree with the article; Hardy isn't quite ready for prime time.
It's funny how people are so eager to generalize from "my wireless card didn't work on Gutsy out of the box" to "Ubuntu [has] very broken wireless driver support".
My generalization stems from the number of comments with peers and countless internet searches for fixes.
In the case of peers, wireless card support was a common complaint.
In the case of searching, looking around the forums will give you a pretty good idea that wireless card support is pretty bad. I bought a standard Belkin wireless card from the local Staples. It should have worked, but didn't.
I recently upgrade my Gusty laptop to Hardy and it fixed a very annoying video bug that I'd been having. So far I'm quite impressed by it. I haven't yet run into any of the issues that others have been complaining about.
I upgraded, and a few annoying problems (the biggest being lack of hibernate) were fixed for me.
What I wasn't thrilled with were the compulsory upgrades of a number of apps; I had to remove firefox3 and install ff2 (don't care for some of the changes), lost XMMS, and KOrganizer has a less-simple UI for managing reminders, among other things.
(Luckily I was not compelled to jump to KDE4. :) )
Other than this specific problem to my situation, Hardy seems to run fine, and in my opinion better than Gutsy. Sometimes I feel as though people tend to make these overblown issues in blogs so they have something controversial to drive traffic to their sites. These issues are small qualms that should be brought up in Ubuntu development forums, not in a blog article that disregards the OS as a whole because of some annoyances of a power user. To be ready for the mass usage, it must be easy to install, have all of the hardware recognized, and have its users easily begin to work as though they previously have. I have had three friends who I would consider to have no computer knowledge other than regular internet usage install the system and get it up and running just from the cd's I gave them, no other input from me. If these people can do it and successfully get work done, I would consider it ready. These are issues that do not apply to 95 percent of computer users.