Fixing GDM a low priority, not likely to happen in Ubuntu 10.04-LTS

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I ranted a little yesterday about the bugs in Ubuntu 9.10 caused by the introduction of GDM2. It looks like Canonical is aware of those bugs, but they're a low priority that likely won't get fixed for the next "Long Term Service" (LTS) release of Ubuntu. With Mark Shuttleworth stepping down as CEO, I'm starting to think this almost mirrors when Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, the company took a nose dive and put out junk.

Sebastien Bacher filed report on the problem back in November of 2009 and it's still under review. It's surprising that Canonical is giving this user interface component such a low priority. With their decision to concentrate on beautifying Ubuntu, one would think they would take care of the technical problems as well.

I pledge right now that if the GDM2 problem isn't fixed I'll drop all further support for Ubuntu in the future. That means at least 100 fewer machines will run Ubuntu every year. We won't build machines with Ubuntu installed I may chose another distribution), we won't hand out Ubuntu CDs, nor install it on people's machines as an alternative to unlicensed copies of Windows (something we've offered quite a few clients). Canonical needs to fix this problem, and they need to realise that things like the login manager are an important fix.

A prompted login has been a part of almost every Linux distribution since Linux's inception. And while the console login-prompt hasn't gone away, this is the first time the login manager prompt has. It's there for a reason, security. Not everyone wants to click on their name/face, and schools and businesses don't want to sort through hundreds of faces in the face browser. It's stupid not to fix this bug, and not to fix it quickly. Canonical has really dropped the ball including GDM2 in Ubuntu 9.10 without a patch to fix this issue.