Just had a strangely unresponsive banshee not allowing me to click on other songs while one was already playing. (In my case banshee was downloading album art at the same time I was trying to switch tracks).
Did the sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade thing and no upgrades to banshee available so Google and went direct to banshee.fm/download
Which is where I read:
Ubuntu has a policy of not updating the version of a shipped application, so the version available might be old.
Added the banshee PPA and repeated the sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 2 step and now I have a banshee that is banshee-ing.
What can we learn from this? Ubuntu packages might not be the latest. Go upstream sometimes there are newer and less buggy packages available from the parent site.
Ooo Yah! (Avatar reference. Because I can)
Simple solution, it's time to leave Ubuntu behind and find another distro which does the job properly.
If you prefer Debian based, you can try :
Debian, if you are confident,
Mint, if you prefer things all done up
CrunchBang, if you are using old hardware
etc.
I hear that (Paul Reference). Yeah Debian would be my choice for production, they care for stability. I still have a soft spot for Fedora and they seem to be innovating and I've always like the unified system-config-etc admin utils. But I'm still a bit of a Mark Shuttleworth fanboy. He's circa my age and his footsteps seem to mark the earth like dinosaur footprints (i.e. they last).