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Why Karmic Koala Sucks

November 3rd, 2009 subogero

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?

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  1. merlin
    November 12th, 2009 at 21:27 | #1

    I just redownloaded Jaunty so I can wipe the abomination called karmik off my laptop.

    I have been a growing fan of ubuntu, and was getting excited as to where it was heading. But Karmik ? Certainly a BIG step down from Jaunty. Just compare the two and it would appear as if Jaunty should have come AFTER Karmik (they just have to give Jaunty a name that begins with L and they have their next distribution done.

    I agree with your comments,

    1) The boot screens ARE uglier than SIN, and Jaunty’s screens are flat out gorgeous compared to Karmik. Karmik’s screens are blurry, and poor in contrast. I was looking at the proposed Karmik start up screens and some of them were incredible, how did they end up with this garbage ?

    2) Boot time on my system seems to have doubled. Why does Gnome take so long to start up now ? It used to almost pop right up ? I am at 65 seconds boot time now? Where is this 25 seconds (soon to be 10 or 5 ??) that they talked about.

    3) The laptop-mode-tools are screwed up.
    – Your laptop will default to full speed turning your machine into a space heater,
    – erroneous measurement of battery life and power usage (says I am using 700 Watts on my laptop, when the power supply is rated for 65 watts.)
    – Can not change the default processor freq.
    – The power history lost all of its functionality.

    I just dont understand how they could take such a big step DOWN.

  2. November 12th, 2009 at 22:02 | #2

    Merlin, what laptop do you have? I ask because I just want to buy one. So far it seems it’ll be a Dell Studio XPS 13. It has a Jaunty version from the factory. Did your laptop work OK with Jaunty?

  3. Gizmo
    November 30th, 2009 at 19:21 | #3

    Karmic Koala also has a big problem regarding dsl internet connection. I can not connect to the internet in ubuntu 9.10 using my username and my password, but I can in ubuntu 9.04. I tried to use ppoeconf but after a few minutes my internet connection fails. It sucks so much. DO NOT UPRGRADE NOW TO 9.10 , WAIT A WHILE UNTIL THE BUGS ARE GETTING FIXED. LONG LIVE LINUX, LONG LIVE UBUNTU 9.04!

  4. AnishD
    December 19th, 2009 at 05:49 | #4

    The biggest disaster is DSL connection. network manager is buggy and you cannot make a DSL connection any more. So long live jaunty.

  5. Jerome
    December 20th, 2009 at 10:58 | #5

    I totally agree and I made the terrible mistake to upgrade without first backing up everything.

    It added softwares I already removed and don’t want on my machine and it removed softwares (Wicd for NetworkManager for instance) that I needed.

    Replacing the good old Add/Remove Programs with this Software Center was a really bad idea.

    I totally don’t care about Ubuntu One they added to sell storage services. It cannot connect and it won’t work out of the box.

    It messed up my sound configuration. I have no more sound so I will have to waste another afternoon of my precious spare time to fix it.

    The fonts are all blurry.

    Worst of all, everything is much slower! I am so pissed off! I will never recommend this distribution to anyone.

    I only upgraded half an hour ago so I am sure I will have more surprises…

    As soon as I will have time I will move on Debian. I was going to try OpenSUSE but I will never trust a distribution sponsored by commercial interests again. Now I had my lesson.

  6. Jerome
    December 20th, 2009 at 19:40 | #6

    I posted a big rant after upgrading but after all things aren’t so bad.

    The sound was gone because I had edited the GRUB menu to load a previous kernel version (with default 2) a while back. Fixing GRUB to load the latest kernel fixed my sound issue that was caused by the wrong ALSA version being used.

    In fact, I don’t understand why it was running so slow after the upgrade but now my system seems to run even faster than before.

    I still have to figure out why the fonts are so messed up in some applications and yes I also don’t like the login screen listing all users. Anyhow I found it very pretty at first. But since I touched the Universal Access Settings the cute theme is gone and I have an ugly gray form even if I reset everything as it used to be…

    Personally, I would just recommend people to wait a little until they stabilize it. To me sticking to an old version forever is not an option.

  7. December 20th, 2009 at 23:19 | #7

    I also keep apologising for the title of the Karmic Sucks post series. As I’ve put it in part 3, it’s probably very nice. But not for human beings. So far. :-)

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