The question serves as the subject of the eponymous thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. And it’s quite valid. I’m really saddened to see the flawed argument put forward by several Ubuntu developers that 8.04 was a right decision. Even today, more than two months since 8.04 was released and some days after 8.04.1 came out, with hundreds of megabytes of updates the problems affecting 8.04 are numerous, major and extremely annoying.
We still have a long way to go before reaching parity with the best (viz. OS X), let alone surpassing it. Judging by the responses on that thread, the first step would need to be the end of the state denial as a defence mechanism, acknowledging the fact that the 8.04 release (as well as 8.04.1) were full of show-stopper bugs and reminiscent of an era when desktop linux was infinitely more annoying than it is today and working towards quality (cf. punctuality). A ‘release’ should translate to ‘usable, polished software’, not ‘alpha quality developer preview software’. 8.04 seemed more like the latter than the former and that needs to change.
