YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary

I’m currently out of town and just reading about Ubuntu Karmic experiences left and right. Some are pretty comprehensive compared to others. Steve Rosenberg of http://www.indiesocal.com who wrote about the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. There were snags in the upgrade especially when it came to X.org but he was able to fix it too. There’s also this thing on the Register about how terrible Ubuntu 9.10 is. But I guess it all boils down to one thing when it comes to any operating system: YMMV. Your mileage may vary.

It’s the combination of the hardware you have with whatever you’re installing. Whether it’s any particular Linux distribution or maybe even Windows, there’d be times that you will hit some snags. Some inconveniences might be greater than others. You can not always tell. (This is also based on my personal experience.)

There will be times that everything is going to work out of the box. Seriously fine and dandy and happy. Right? I get those times. But there are moments that there are unexpected kinks. It could affect the sound card, it could be the video card. It could be something else like wifi. There are those sweet moments that I know people are happy about, including myself.

I’ve read the acronym YMMV on a mailing list and I wondered what it was all about. And someone just explained it to me that sometimes people don’t have the same experiences when it comes to installing things or trying out new applications. It often grounds me to the reality that not everything about x distro will be all bad or all good. That’s why even if I do read that x distro (in this case Ubuntu 9.10) isn’t quite as perfect, I still would give it a try once I can. After all, I do read good stuff about it too.

No distro is perfect. Exaggerated reports or isolated cases will not be very helpful either in assessing these things. So just keep in mind, YMMV for each time that you want to use something.

Post from: New Linux User