Movies. Or at least one of them to be precise. I have an avi file which is played like a breeze in Jaunty, but it crashes Mplayer in Karmic immediately.
Scanners. There is no more “scanner” group, so you have to manually sudo chmod 666 the scanner device before using. Otherwise the driver simply does not detect the device. And this is a Canon scanner, where a Linux driver is kindly supplied from the factory.
On the positive side, the bloke with the scanner problem is the same colleague who nearly gave up last time. He did not. He managed to install Karmic eventually. But he will replace it with Jaunty.
There is an ever increasing ubuntu user group at the office, and the general consensus is that Karmic is to be avoided. I apologise again for the rude title, but if you’re not a kernel wizard, avoid Karmic. It is probably very nice, but one thing it is not: Linux for human beings.
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.
I’ve just upgraded to ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. I should not have.
1. Login
The Login Screen is ugly. It displays the computer’s users. There is no way to change it. And nothing else, for that matter. And it is booting SLOWER than Jaunty by 9 seconds.
2. Gnome
Everything seems to be slower. My customized desktop theme fell apart.
3. Firefox
No Hungarian spell-check dictionary available for Firefox 3.5.
And the too-tiny-font problem is still here.
4. Thunderbird
It became slow and unstable. It’s on the verge of being unusable.
5. Gnome-terminal
My customized xterm size was overwritten to the ridiculous 80×24 during the upgrade. Config Wizardry again.
6. Gnometris (Tetris)
The biggest disaster: it is completely broken!
I know. I’m an evil and rude bastard. I should not criticize people who kindly develop software in their spare time. But you have been warned:
If you’ve got Jaunty, do not, by any means, upgrade to Karmic.
Actually, I wanted to rearrange my partitions anyway. Where did I put that Jaunty CD?
