Why Karmic Koala Sucks 2
A friend of mine in the office, who was a bit fed up with Windows’ slowness and vulnerability at home, tried to install Ubuntu Karmic Koala last night.
It took him some time to overcome a Raid-connected PATA hard-disk first. But finally Karmic was installed. It just did not boot. It took ages to show the boot menu (if at all) and, after selecting Linux, the best performance was continuous reboot.
The new superfast Grub2 bootloader is apparently to blame. The goal was to create a faster bootloader. The results?
- If you update from Jaunty, Karmic admits a full bootloader update is too risky, so you get some kind of hybrid, which is half a minute slower
- If you make a fresh Karmic installation, it just does not work
Apparently, many people in the office are having these problems. Is there anybody out there who is happy with Karmic?
Sadly, the conclusion of my colleague is that “this is NOT the beginning of a beautiful friendship” with free software. They will stick with Windows. However hard I tried to convince him to have a go with Jaunty.
