After a couple of days playing again with Lucid, I discovered auto-mounting removable media is broken. It takes two or three tries just for a simple USB memory stick. Music CDs are not properly handled by any of a number of different players: Rhythm Box, Mplayer, and Xine, to name three. Even with all the restricted additions and Medibuntu, things aren’t working properly. I could not copy a DVD without losing the video, for example. Just playing a video DVD was an experience, because dvd-css kept barfing.
Chrome no longer rendered some sites properly after the upgrade to Lucid. I think the Cream/Vim combination has been broken on Debian for years, so Ubuntu has never had one which behaved properly, including this time. Things which worked under 9.10 don’t any more. I am asking my computer ministry clients to stay with Jaunty for now.
Meanwhile, I’m going to continue testing RHEL 6.0-Beta a little more. While there is some risk with things like PySol, it’s easy enough to avoid it for now. Should something else cause a similar X-server crash, I may try to find a way to discuss it with the developers.
Long delayed update — 15JUN10: The breakages have been fixed, apparently, so go for the gusto. I’m using Lynx now as my daily desktop. The issue with RHEL 6 crashing is, near as I can tell, an issue between the drivers (including experimental gl for ATI) and the still crappy accelerated desktop effects eye-candy, along with automated modesetting in the kernel.
