Karmic Koala: The Trainwreck Around the Bend

Twitter and Ubuntu blogs everywhere are all aflutter in anticipation of next month’s release of Karmic Koala.  I read tech sites and blogs every day, and I can’t seem to escape all the shouting about the next killer feature coming up in 9.10.

For example, the aptly named OMG! UBUNTU! recently posted about the new boot and login screens coming to Karmic.  Gee, haven’t we seen this before?

OMG! UBUNTU! YAY!

The new boot splash is something special, for sure.  Feast your eyes:

Uh... Wow.

The ever-competent boys over at Phoronix also did another post on the new boot splash.  This time, instead of plastering their logo in the middle of captured video, like Softpedia, they decided to videotape a glare-obscured ugly-ass laptop running the alpha:

Ok, well maybe that’s not so exciting.  But surely there’s some more awesome stuff coming up, right?

Of course!  Karmic is also rumored to include Ubuntu’s new Software Store.  Here, have a screenshot:

Exciting shit

This aims to replace the aging Synaptic and Add/Remove Programs dialogs.  Fortunately, fellow reader, they’re leaving aptitude and apt-get un-fucked-with.

Well, all of this is a little underwhelming, isn’t it?  You would think that after Jaunty Jackalope’s lukewarm reception, they would pack a killer app in there or two.  Unsurprisingly, you would be wrong.  Instead of sticking with Pidgin, for example, Karmic is said to be switching to Empathy for messaging.  Nevermind that Empathy is a buggy, half baked mess.  Nevermind that Pidgin has finally added voice and video support.  I’d lay money down right now that 9 of 10 users will uninstall Empathy and replace it with Pidgin within the first hour of installation.

So what is there to look forward to?

Well, Karmic users will finally get Firefox 3.5 in the base installation and repositories.  They’ll also get GNOME 2.26, some new artwork, and another animal-kingdom idol.

But don’t forget the #1 reason for Ubuntu: its excellent and ever expanding community of Ubuntards, your personal support army.

Here’s what you’ll get with your order!

Exhibit A:

Not quite...

Exhibit B, more wisdom from the tards, after a user asks why he can’t cd to a directory:

Correct!

Then, thankfully, an expert comes along to correct the error:

Oh, so close...

These are just examples from the last two hours of posts on the forums.  I have some real gems tucked away for a later date, but these serve to illustrate the point.  They’re just the blind leading the blind.

• 

4 Comments to Karmic Koala: The Trainwreck Around the Bend

I was trying Karmic Koala beta and I thought the ubuntu team made some terrible changes.

I love the quick installation and noticeably improved speed, but things such as the redesigned software store is terrible and makes it hard to install and uninstall softwares, its actually faster to do it in the Terminal. I feel they are trying to dumb down the control features to make it more simple but leaving more advance users disappointed, since they have to compete in graphic against Windows 7 and Mac. There many little tweaks that I simply dislike.

I hope they will improve for the final version, but as it stands I rather skip this one, stay with 9.04 and see how Ubuntu 10 will turn out.

eksasol on 14 October 2009

I hope they’ve successfully integrated PulseAudio there… If it’s in the same state, then it sucks very much.

Miloss on 16 October 2009

“Exhibit B, more wisdom from the tards, after a user asks why he can’t cd to a directory:”

Well, maybe you should learn some basic unix/linux yourself. B was correct. If you don’t have execute permissions on a directory, you can not cd to it nor access the files in it.

You owe an apology to B for calling him a tard, you tard.

Tormod on 5 December 2009

Tormod — I definitely said Exhibit B was correct. But look at the followup underneath, from the true tard:

“no, you shouldn’t need execute permissions unless you are actually executing an executable file…”

THERE is your tard

admin on 5 December 2009

Trackbacks / Pingbacks

Leave a comment