Karmic Koala review
November 2nd, 2009 by alex
Ubuntu 9.10 is a bit of a disappointment.
I’ve upgraded one of my Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) installations to Karmic and am now experiencing a whole host of issues:
- slow boot times – It is twice as slow as jaunty
- ugly boot screens - Why did change the boot progress bar into a windows style “i mean nothing” rolling indicator? Why did they take away all colors? Are they thinking everybody is colorblind?
- random kernel issues – Hey, at least I get a nice red exclamation mark in the top right corner, telling me not to rely on my system anymore and reboot. Back to the windows days?
- degraded performance – Can’t quite put my finger on where or why, but it feels sluggish.
And this is not just my experience, if you want to read what others are saying check out the register.
As much as I’d like to say otherwise, I advise against an upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10. Especially that the next version (Lusty Lemur Lucid Lynx 10.4) is going to be a Long Term Support release (LTS). Which hopefully means they are going to spend more effort making it release-ready before the release.
Too bad it happened right after the Windows 7 release, that has been winning praises (not without some caveats though)
I actually like KK so far, and not just because it now matches my last name initial. I did a fresh install (I rarely choose the upgrade path), and the process was flawless.
I don’t think the boot time increased, but I used to have Intrepid on that machine, so I cannot compare to Jaunty’s boot time on it. This is a media center pc, so I hope I can disable some services and improve the boot time even more.
Your comment about the boot screens is highly subjective. I actually like the boot screens – they are ascetic and elegant. I like the new login theme too.
I’ve got the red exclamation mark after a suspend/resume failure, but I don’t worry about that – I know that suspend never worked on this particular machine, probably due to a pretty old nvidia card.
But again, I’m talking about a media pc, so I don’t have high expectations for it. I only put a newer system on it hoping that resume would work. It didn’t. Oh well, not a big deal.
Thank you for the information though… I’ll stick with Jaunty on both my desktop and laptop for now.
So, are you now a part of the KKK (Karmic Koala Kubuntu)?
You are right about boot times – Jaunty was way faster than Intrepid, but Karmic is now about as fast or may be a little faster than Intrepid.
My biggest gripe about the boot screens is that they took away the progress bar. I’ve grown used to seeing how far my system is from being ready for use, even if it was subjective.
B/W logo is not my thing either.