Published at LXer:

The popular Ubuntu Linux's six-month release schedule keeps it in the public eye; every release is greeted with a barrage of news, reviews, praise, and complaints. It seems the last few releases have generated an increasing number of cries for longer release schedules, that six months is too short and results in too many bugs. Mark Shuttleworth discussed at length the importance and benefits of a short release cycle in his Linuxcon keynote: it generates excitement and keeps contributors motivated. And it follows the long-standing principles of "many eyes make all bugs shallow" and "release early, release often."

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"release early, release often." and with lots of bugs. Yep great way to go.

"Release early, release often" is OK if the number of new features is small enough that they can be reasonably well integrated and tested with the available resources. I figure the problem is not so much the release cycle philosophy as being over-ambitious with new features.

An unfortunate effect of what ubuntu are doing is that they attract a high proportion of users new to Linux (because of ubuntu's reputation as an easy, user friendly distro) and these users, perhaps looking for something more stable than Windows, experience many things that don't work and may give up on Linux.