Why I Love Ubuntu
One Reason of Many


With any software release there are inevitably bugs. How many millions of lines of code are there, written by these flawed organic brains? I rest my case re: that. But what I love about Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is that instead of having to wait for Brand X to broadcast a bug fix which could take days or weeks or even months, with Ubuntu it may only take a few hours or at most a few days. And most of the time you can do the minor but annoying stuff yourself. Yes, you can actually get into the actual code and fix it yourself. No Brand X Bug Fix of the Day Update.

Case in point: With 8.04 (the new Hardy Heron) I suddenly could no longer put my computer in Hibernate mode. My Ubuntu machine, in fact both my machines, are laptops. And both Compaqs now but that's irrelevant. But anyway... at first I had thought the Hibernate bug was just this computer, as I had just acquired it not three days before the Hardy Heron release. I thought it was a peculiarity and sort of auto-lived-with-it.

But as it turns out, this is not just me. Apparently many laptop users are having this problem.

While poking about today I found a very nice Ubuntu tips and tricks blog . On it, the proprietor of the blog includes the fix for the Hibernate problem. It amounts to adding "fglrx" in one specific line of acpi-support. It's a problem with the ATI video drivers. This command removes the drivers on hibernate and reloads them on resume, or something of the sort. Problem solved.

That's all it was. Took about 2 minutes, once I had the instructions.

That kind of thing would merit a bug fix update on Windows that would take longer than that to download, and require a restart of the computer wasting even more time. And be spaghetti-coded to boot, probably.

Ubuntu. It does a body good.