Ubuntu 9.10: My First 10 Days
It’s been about ten days since I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my main computer. Here are some thoughts on the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, now that I’ve used it intensively for my daily workflow.
The Karmic Koala wasn’t received happily by all corners of the Linux community. Criticisms about the release being too buggy were widespread; some users on the Ubuntu Forums went so far as to call Karmic “Ubuntu’s Vista.”
A lot of those complaints are probably unfair. Bugs exist in every operating system, especially shortly after its release. And as one blogger wrote, just as many users expressed gripes about Jaunty when it debuted six months ago, but there was no media storm of discontent then.
In my experience, Karmic is far from an unmitigated failure. But it’s not perfect, either. Here are its chief pros and cons, as I see them. Naturally, these reflect only my own experience; other users doubtless have their own selfish lists of things they like and hate about Karmic.
Pros
- The Koala is a lot prettier than its predecessors. I wouldn’t call it unreasonably gorgeous, but the new login manager and updated themes have paid off.
- Faster boot times. I’ve never seen any desktop Linux distribution start up this fast.
- My Intel graphics card’s performance on my circa-2004 Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop has improved by leaps and bounds. For the first time in history, I can run compiz on that machine with acceptable responsiveness. (Unfortunately, I can’t run compiz at all on my desktop; see “Cons”).
- My b43 wireless card works much better. I can connect to my university’s WPA-enterprise protected network with no problems, which I couldn’t do in Jaunty.
- Firefox 3.5 by default is nice. I installed it in Jaunty from a PPA, but it’s great to have it in Karmic without any extra effort.
Cons
- On my desktop, compiz doesn’t work at all, due to this bug which makes X freeze due to an unclear problem with UXA acceleration and the Intel video driver. I’ve diligently reported the issue, gathered the requested information and searched for workarounds, all of which have amounted to nothing. I’m real upset about this, and will probably downgrade my desktop to Jaunty if this isn’t fixed soon, because I really miss desktop effects.
- The volume applet, which has been totally and inexplicably redesigned for each Ubuntu release in recent memory, has taken a step backwords. There are no “+” or “-” buttons for clicking to raise or lower the volume, which is annoying.
- npviewer.bin–the dirty hack that makes the 32-bit flash plugin for Firefox work on 64-bit kernels–ate up half of my CPU for no good reason. I nixed that by wiping out npviewer and installing Adobe’s 64-bit flash plugin, which works great and really should be the default by now.
- The weather applet that used to display next to my clock no longer works. I haven’t yet figured this out, and I really miss knowing whether it’s sunny or cloudy without the hassle of having to look out my window.
- The init.d script for the NetworkManager daemon has been renamed, which I find slightly obnoxious. It makes sense to get rid of the needless upper-case, but I suspect this will be a point of frustration for users following documentation that has not been updated.
Overall, Karmic is a fine release, especially given that it’s LTS-1. But it also presents some non-trivial bugs that Ubuntu developers should really work on before designing the next iteration of the volume applet.
I’m a PCLinuxOS user, but my wife’s complaining about her laptop’s Win7 annoyances coincided with the Ubuntu release, so I took the chance to try it.
I only wish they could include ndiswrapper in the default install, for I had to use an ethernet connection during install to set up our wireless connection. Other than that, everything is working fine. Even the browns are really attractive this time around.
So, Ubuntu will stay. 🙂
gt;gt; “The weather applet that used to display next to my clock no longer works.”
Just open teh configuration dialog, recheck the “shwo weather” checkbox and it works.
“Bugs exist in every operating system, especially shortly after its release.”
This is because the community allows this to happen. If the community as a whole were to throw a holy friggin’ fit and boycott Ubuntu when bugs are found, then future Ubuntu releases would have a lot fewer bugs. It’s possible to write software without bugs, the developers just don’t seem to want to do it. As long as bugs are an acceptable part of software, software will be released with bugs.
Very happy with Karmic and wondering how many paper-cuts were fixed? Also, why no system-wise graphic sound equalizer yet? I am also wondering if we’ll ever have an integrated set of multimedia tools that use a common library or architecture to get the kind of drag-and-drop interactivity that you see with iMovie and iPhoto. If only I good drag and drop a sound file or photo into a movie clip and make a movie, I would solve all my problems and gripes with the OS not being a productive tool, but a huge time waster.
@Annie: Linux users pitch a fit all the time and it doesn’t make much of a difference. The only way to make an impact is with money. Offer a million dollars for someone to redesign X from scratch and I think you’ll get some attention. Until then, you’d be yelling into a vacuum.
At any rate, no software is free of bugs. Ubuntu just happens to be overloaded with bugs, largely due to a lack of cohesion. The parts don’t work well together because they weren’t designed to work well together. Most “pieces” of Ubuntu were designed for modularity, which is great in theory but often results in disorganized interfaces, duplication, and excessive configuration.
The other problem is, of course, the ancient parts of Linux desktop stack that everyone is afraid to touch for fear of knocking over a house of cards: X11 is such an abomination, for example.
Pros:
Better GDM
Software Center is great but I still use Synaptic since it does everything
Ubuntu One is cool but Dropbox is better and the new Windows Explorer plugin for SkyDrive (25GB) brings huge competition
Disk Utility is GREAT. I had a lot of problems when installing and this new tool figured out that it was my failing HDD. Neither Jaunty or Vista found this so this was a Godsend.
Cons:
New version of Epiphany is only Webkit and barely works
The Volume Applet is built into the Notification Area and cant be moved independantly which I hate. I want it on my side panel beside Music applet.
I can no longer use my mouse wheel to scroll between workspaces like I could on Jaunty. I imported my compiz settings so I have no idea what the problem is.
After install I lacked the ability to use my super keys for keyboard shortcuts.
There isnt a version of Global Menu for Karmic and the Jaunty version crashes gparted, gnome color chooser, and system monitor.
For me, Karmic has been a mixed bag. Most of it is okay, but there’s really nothing to get excited about for the end-user.
I have that annoying “popping” sound that everyone has been complaining about, but the commonly cited solution didn’t fix it. It makes my desktop unusable, so I just uninstalled the whole lot.
And I don’t understand why I have to edit Grub’s configuration by hand. Modifying Grub 2’s default selection shouldn’t require me spending an hour reading endless forum discussions on why Grub 2 is better than Grub 1. I just don’t care. And no, I don’t want to read the Grub manual. Why the f*** would I want to do that? Just give me a damn GUI (by default) and get the out of my way.
When I tried an in-place upgrade my system crawled along. Literally minutes passed as I waited for the top panel menus to respond.
However everything works fine with a 100% clean install. That includes backing up my data and wiping my /home directory too. I’m pretty sure some old settings, possibly from Compiz, were causing the responsiveness issue. But as I say with a clean install it’s all good.
The lack of the + or – buttons on the volume control isn’t an issue for me. I use the multimedia keys on my keyboard. They work just fine. The new log-in screen is awesome! The on screen keyboard should help MID users or slate tablet device users.
The new themes are a welcome edition. But some of the wallpapers look as though they were tacked on at the last minute. It’s easy enough to fix and not a major issue. But in a way that makes it worse that the wallpapers weren’t better quality or better matched to the themes.
The bright orange default wallpaper was definitely a bad choice. Canonical should have gone with something similar to the log-in screen background. There’s just too much of a contrast between the log-in screen and the default desktop.
Ubuntu One sucks. There’s just no other way to put it. But it’s a first attempt at desktop cloud integration for Canonical. So I’ll assume for now it will get better as time passes.
The live CD also managed to use my SLI dual graphics cards just fine this time around. That’s been an issue in the last few Ubuntu upgrades. Another welcome feature was the ability for the live CD to make use of and install to RAID arrays without any extra effort on my part.
So some steps forward. Some steps back. Something for Canonical to work on for the next release.
Over all I’m pretty pleased with Karmic. It boost faster than Jaunty. Much faster on my laptop with it’s SSD formatted to ext4! I need to install boot chart to see exactly how fast it’s booting.
I certainly don’t think Ubuntu Karmic is as bad as Vista. That’s just going too far. For starters I haven’t wasted nearly £300 on something I’m not happy to use. And it actually does boot faster than the previous version.
#4 = super geeky
How can you “really” miss such a thing? How hard is to look? What cage are you living in?
That’s Ubuntu.
Every release fixes some of the major bugs that were introduced six months ago in the previous release, but creates just as many new bugs that you’ll have to live with for 6 more months.
I, for one, am sick and tired of this pattern.
“Bugs exist in every operating system, especially shortly after its release.”
Annie Brach Says:
“This is because the community allows this to happen. If the community as a whole were to throw a holy friggin’ fit and boycott Ubuntu when bugs are found, then future Ubuntu releases would have a lot fewer bugs.”
While this strategy might work for a commercial product with paid developers, I very much doubt it would encourage Ubuntu’s devs to do better. They’d probably either move on to the next most popular distro or continue doing exactly what they doing now.
I tend to believe that the “other” market solution proposed by Josh would work better. If we could use something like Ubuntu Brainstorm and vote for particular bug fixes or features with real money, I’m pretty sure we’d get a different result. Maybe a “trusted” third party could help by aggregating payments and doing the QA.
I like the idea of offering money to replace xorg but I think the $x00 I would be prepared to pledge would be too small to get things really moving.
I have followed Karmic development closely (via VM installs), but not being a Gnome user there are too many negatives for me to rush into upgrading any of my real computers. Xubuntu, in particular, has gone to heck in a handbasket (IMO) because it gets minimal quality control.
My experience went like this:
– clean install of Xubuntu…
– discovered several nagging bugs that drove me insane…
– waited a week and updates sorted them…
– about to declare my happiness with Karmic (at long last)…
– discovered two more annoying bugs!!!!
– waiting for fixes AGAIN! (burnfree not recognised in Gnomebaker or Brasero is the one I am concerned about)
I think it is really disappointing this release has been plagued by so many annoying bugs — more than should have happened.
That said, it is now running well and the Xubuntu guys get my thanks for these points:
– no mono (thank you!)
– no pulse audio (super thank you!)
– even my physical volume control worked with this release!
I tried Karmic and hated it. I multi boot between Ubuntu 9.04, Debian Lenny with backports and Debian Squeeze with backports. Karmic was a huge disappointment for me. Karmic made Debian Squeeze look stable!
I’ll play With Ubuntu but much prefer the rock solid stability and greater tweakability of Debian’s stable branch.
I find Debian faster then it’s derivatives as well though Debian isn’t as newbie friendly as Ubuntu. Power users will be much happier on either Debian Lenny (Stable) or Squeeze(Testing) then Ubuntu.
Karmic is the WinME of Linux…..
I wouldnt go so far as to count Karmic down as ME, I would say that it seems to be the Vista of Ubuntu though. That alone is harsh enough considering the press Win7 is getting now.
I had issues as did many people it seems, but I think Karmic did what it really set out to do. It pulled in several new versions of components such as GRUB, GNOME, EXT, and the GDM. They also launched a cloud initiative and made some real leaps forward in Software Center.
I think for all that, Karmic should be excused for buggyness. The October version is not the April version. They do no stand for the same position in development. Karmic did what it set out to do, A LOT. 10.04 will fix issues, add some more, get the boot time down, and make for a rock solid version.
I look forward to April. I want to see how much more robust Software Center gets. I also hope to see some gparted features pulled into Disk Utility.
To bring my point home, Vista was a complete redesign of Windows. It did a lot, but stumbled in some ways. Win7 didnt change much but some UI and it was trimmed down. I think 10.04 will do the same.
There are pros and cons to every OS that gets released. Seems these people just can’t make the perfect OS, no matter how much we’d like them to.
I’ll be waiting for 10.04, not because of any problems with 9.10, just me wanting to stay on the LTS track. I will say that nothing from any subsequent release has made me want to leave 8.04. I’ll probably upgrade, or just reinstall fresh, after a month or so of 10.04’s release.
Well Karmic for me has been 100% stable as with other previous Ubuntu releases. I think the last quarter of this year could be classed as the rise of the Ubuntu haters as they are becoming more and more vocal, tuxmachines is a good example. Mandriva has been well received, tomorrow Fedora 12 is out and a week later OpenSuse 11.2 I shall wait and see how many bugs they ship with and how vocal the media is about them.
Personally I don’t care for OpenSuse, its never worked for me, Fedora is great but I am not a developer, and Mandriva looks like they have got their act together over the last couple of releases. The distro’s I use on my machines are, main box Ubuntu 64bit, family laptop Pardus 2009, spare box Arch 64bit, just in case you thought I was one of those fanatical Ubuntu fanboyz trying to convert the world 😉
[…] have their own selfish lists of things they like and hate about Karmic. Read the full story at: http://www.workswithu.com/2009/11/10/ubuntu-910-my-first-10-days/ Tagged with: Desktopsnbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Karmic […]
The weather applet that used to display next to my clock no longer works.
It works for me… in Ubuntu…
Karmic has definitely improved by leaps and bounds in many areas. The new kernel seems to have vastly improved CPU efficiency and memory usage and more or less everything else works out-of-the-box in a slick and responsive fashion. Best release at least since Dapper Drake.
Full review at http://www.verbbusters.com/karmic-koala/karmic-koala.html
Thank you for keeping this thread mostly ontopic and serious. (Works for me’s are not useful, I think).
I do not, in any way, understand why people would call this “ME of Ubuntu or Vista of Ubuntu”. To me, Karmic is by far the best release yet:
Pros:
* Hibernate and suspend now works well on my laptop. The webcam LED still lights up after resume, but that’s a fairly small bug. In previous versions, I couldn’t use the network after hib/susp. In Karmic, I can.
* Palimpsest (the new disk manager) is really nice. Automatic SMART-testing of harddisks is a must when you use a harddisk on a laptop. It really helps.
* Panels (mostly notification area) now works well and looks nice.
* The audio controls have improved vastly. I really love it. Audio has been way too complicated in the past. It seems to be maturing rapidly.
* Ubuntu Software Center really rocks. I love it.
* Intel VGA works really well now, which was the primary reason for my upgrading so quickly to Karmic.
Cons:
* Intel VGA drivers still make my system freeze sometimes, when using a screensaver. It’s so infrequent, I can live with it, though obviously, it’d be nice if it got fixed soon.
* Network-manager has regressed in relation to my Nokia N95 8GB. I use it as a modem, and NM often goes into a CPU frenzy, meaning I have to restart it using sudo service network-manager restart. Otherwise, it works well. I suspect this is a small bug, and I’m currently looking into it. (I added a launcher to the panel to run “gksu service network-manager restart”, which makes it less of a pain, but this must get fixed soon)
My hope now, is that this LTS-1 can act like a sort-of QA-release for the LTS, so that Lucid Lynx will be nice stable from the get-go. I think this is a great strategy. Make LTSes the “main release”. LTS+1 can add radical changes, LTS+2 can refine them, LTS+3 can stabilize them and LTS then supports them for a long time. This will also give us much more time to develop documentation, books, tutorials and classes for when the LTS is released.
[…] Ubuntu 9.10: My First 10 Days It’s been about ten days since I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my main computer. Here are some thoughts on the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, now that I’ve used it intensively for my daily workflow. […]
I was concerned about ext4 being the default for Ubuntu from here on out, because when I tried it it would crash my system every time I tried to delete a file. But I’ve been using it since the release of Karmic now, and it’s been great. That was my biggest concern, and I’ve actually had fewer problems with Karmic overall than with Jaunty. I like the direction Ubuntu is going. It’s becoming more refined and more pleasant to use with each release.
My experience…
First Ubuntu release with a professional OS look by default, not something to be embarrassed of again. Faster bootup, faster IO operations, more FPS in games. So that’s quite good.
But PA, as usual, is more trouble and requires time to fix.
I have heard all the whinging and complaining before. Ubuntu 6.10 was my first Linux distro install just after it was released and I wasn’t aware of the talk of how 6.10 was buggy and unstable. By the time I had realized this, I was already using Ubuntu 6.10 every day with absolutely no problems, everything worked for a newcomer to Linux. I am so very glad that I was not aware of all the whinging and negative reviews because if I had it may of turned me off completely. Let me say that I have learnt an important lesson when reading reviews. A lesson which I like to share with others.
Again, Ubuntu 9.10 works fine for me. My main machine is still on 8.04 and most likely will remain until its end of life. BTW, opensuse 11.2 latest still fails to work on my generic Dell PC. However, that doesn’t give the right to trash opensuse simply because it doesn’t work for me.
I like where Ubuntu is going but I just wish it would hurry up!
“The weather applet that used to display next to my clock no longer works. I haven’t yet figured this out, and I really miss knowing whether it’s sunny or cloudy without the hassle of having to look out my window.”
Lol the update the day after this was written fixed that 🙂
as for con#1: X freezes for intel 945G display chip, try this, put this line at the end of your kernel in /boot/grub/grub.cfg : nolapic nomodeset
then try to run your compiz with command : compiz –replace –indirect-rendering , if it works, put it in Startup Applications. it works in my box.
glowndark: many, many thanks for that suggestion–it seems to work, which makes me really happy. I wish I didn’t have to choose between desktop effects and kernel mode setting, but this is still a huge help and might help track down the source of the problem.
I’ve beer trying to use ubuntu for the last 4 days and I am having a TRUE NIGHTMARE. I just want to install couple packages and it seems to be impossible to do without creating a huge mess… this Ubuntu 9.1 REALLY SUCKS
My gripes with XUbuntu:
– It doesn’t come with some of the new versions of applications that regular Ubuntu comes with, like UbuntuOne, the new software installer, Janitor, and disk utility.
That’s it. The entire system’s been smooth sailing for me ever since the first install.
First I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on my 6 year old Sager Notebook. No major problems. Minor was time from start to finish.
2nd, Installed 9.10 on IBM 300PL 900mhz…flawless. This machine is dual booted with 8.04.3 server.
3rd. Installed Karmic as guest on Virtualbox. This took close to 2 hours to complete. No issues,
4th. Installed Karmic on my main computer to a 3rd hd. Installed was quick…but at boot…got an error..no Grub found. I ditched that installation and installed on 2nd hd…have issue with screen resolution, black screen when I set resolution above 1024 in Gnome. Issue not present with LXDE environment.
Will find solutions to Gnome issues. I started with Ubuntu 5.04.
Next project to export/import Virtualbox images to Virtualbox on 9.10. Should be completed by the end of the month.
In closing…. Ubuntu Linux OS transcends Desktop Computing.
Senior Citizen
‘n Georgia USA
I think Karmic is overall much better than Jaunty. I still had some annoying bugs with audio that worked just fine and out-of-the-box on Jaunty.
I love Ubuntu Software Center! 🙂 Still wondering why not every app is not present there..? I was e.g. trying to install QCad and Subversion but had to use Synaptic instead.
For those of us using Ubuntu server thanks to Amazon, this is the first version I’ve ever had to delay/avoid implementing.
My test server puked on the RAID controller, VMWare doesn’t work with the kernel without a patch that introduces memory leaks, and the memory footprint is up by 30% overall.
Wow, sounds almost as bad as Windows, reading over all these comments! Wild freeware and open source development tends to be buggy by its very nature. Pass.
For me karmic is just the best release !
Ubuntu was installed in 2 different computers one with an intel gpu and the other with an ati 3650,the upgrade to karmic was flawless and smooth!
The sound seems to be better,compizconfig works like a charm and generally i adore karmic!
@ gadget sleuth
please test yourself karmic if you want to judge!
Absurd generalizations about the open source is pure idiocy…
[…] Vor- und Nachteile des Karmischen Koalas gt;gt; Hau Windows weg und installiere […]
My Karmic Koala experience. Was a nightmare errors like I have ever seen. Nothing wanted to work had trouble getting online. It crashes I used Ubuntu for a long time. I had to go back to 8.10 intrepid. I use Ubuntu on my laptop for work. For network diagnostics I will wait until. The next version Lucid Lynx 10.04 I hope it is better.