I'm really getting worried here. I think it's already past feature freeze and the amount of bugs is just overwhelming.
Since the update to the .15 kernel my system won't start hal - known bug with my TV card driver. If I remove the card it boots up, but firefox will crash with a segmentation fault, and none of the cd burning applications I tried worked.
With the older kernel I still get a lot of crashes. The mplayer package can't handle broken avi streams nearly as well as it did in 7.10, and from time to time my keyboard locks up, the mouse will still move, but I can't click anything - programs keep running, but ctrl-alt-backspace and the like won't do anything, I have to power it off.
It's two weeks until the final release. I'm really worried. I remember 7.04 was sufficiently stable at alpha-4.

Anyone else experiencing these problems? - I know lots of people do, I found confirmed bug reports for most of these issues, I just don't know if I'm especially unlucky, or if that is the current state of things.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Ubuntu and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Well if the exposure it deserves is NO exposure...

Just kidding.

Seriously though... I thought this was definitely more of a smalltalk thread. If I was going to post it in the ubuntu sub-forum. I would have done it differently... Actually I would have posted it on Ubuntuforums.org

The Ubuntu forum (and any distro forum) is a sub-community in itself. Some members only browse the forum of their distro so any questions about that distro which are posted elsewhere may not be seen.

Plus, you are asking about technical issues and General is only for technical questions that aren't about Linux really.

pffft
Well, ok.

One more thing... I've had this on a second pc that I loaded with the xubuntu beta, too. My usb hdd is getting mounted with one underscore more every mount, and a new directory is created - like:

/media/_media_disk
/media/_media_disk_
/media/_media_disk__
/media/_media_disk___
/media/_media_disk____

And virtualbox refuses to start because a CD image for one of my virtualboxes is supposed to be on that drive but now it has 15 or so underscores... I'll put it into fstab, but that sucks also.
It doesn't matter though because vboxdrv refuses to start (on .16 - there is no kernel module for .12)

Then sometimes audio is on one channel only.

I can only use firefox with my sound-on-board card, no matter how I set it up.

I'll hold out until the final release. If they don't perform a miracle I might go back to Fedora once more.

I haven't run Ubuntu for a while, but is it my imagination, or do i keep seeing that with every new release they introduce far more bugs than in the previous one? It seems that every time they release, the blogs and comment sites post madly about how things are more broken.

I might a bit biased towards Ubuntu (Ubuntu fanboi?) but my first Ubuntu release install was Breezy Badger (5.10) and I've felt that each succeeding release (6.06 and 7.10) have been better (than the earlier ones). Then again, I am not an early adopter (ran Dapper for almost two years)- right now my desktop at work runs Gibbon and I would not upgrade to Hardy on the machine anytime soon.

So the comments you see about how things are broken might be from the early and brave adopters ;-). I had to deal with some grief when I did a dist-upgrade to Dapper and I've since learned my lesson . However I am getting a new laptop in two weeks and I'll be trying out Hardy on that machine .

That makes sense. I used to always try to run the latest versions and, for a while, fixing errors was fun. Nowadays I don't have the time or energy and go for stability.

The comments could also be down to the whole "Ubuntu is great and always works flawlessly out of the box" reputation it has, so when you grab an alpha and expect it to run like the final version you end up with a lot of heartache and internet rage.

I'm running 8.04 beta within XP from a wubi installation and it's almost perfect. I experience an occasional browser freeze every now and then but as soon as the release version comes out it is going on all of my computers (6 2+g P4 Dells with 3/4 to 2g ram). The only problem I encountered was installing the restricted packages - it did not install java and FrostWire wouldn't run. Looking up FrostWire in synaptic showed a small note at the bottom of the window saying that java was needed; and ask if I wanted to install it. I said yes and it installed java5 instead of 6 but everything runs great!

It's not like I'm not expecting trouble... I have run a lot of alpha software and OS's.
But this is just too much for me. After the latest update It started into 640x480 even though the nvidia driver loads. The xorg.conf is basically empty - they must have shifted the configuration somewhere else, so I'm not confident with just adding stuff there. An xserver reconfigure got me half way, but I couldn't set the refresh rate correctly. So in order not to get eye cancer I starte off my old windows hdd, but XP wasn't really happy with the hardware choices I made since I last used it, and did everything to remind me why I abandoned it in the first place.

XavierP, you're right - at least from my point of few things went down stability wise from... 6.06 - I think 6.06 was a big improvement all around. - to 7.10. But they've added so many features, and made so many packages available that I can forgive a little flakyness here and there.
The jury is still out for 8.04. We'll see.

I'll be taking 8.04 out for a spin when it's released this week. Not sure yet whether I'll switch to it, though. I might wait until the point release (8.04.1), as the impression I've got from the mailing lists is that (at least up until the RC) it's been plagued by tons of issues. I find it insane that there are so many issues this late into the cycle. I think the Ubuntu brass needs to make some serious changes to the development process in order to increase the amount of time which goes toward QA and fixing bugs prior to release. Specially for LTS releases, which are supposed to be enterprise-friendly. Otherwise we end-up with stuff like the Firefox which is still beta included in 8.04.

I've had to (re-)install 3 times due to trashed systems - twice on the alpha (alpha is alpha, no gripe there), once on the Beta.
They still can't get the 3945 working properly. *BIG* no-no IMHO - lots of kit shipping this chip. Can't blame Intel, they seem to be doing their bit.