Well, well…what a nice little hornet’s nest I managed to stir up with my last post, which was a rant against Ubuntu 9.10 and it’s unfortunately named Karmic Koala. The fact that it should have been obvious that it was a RANT aside, for those of you who were at least polite about your curiosity will get more “meat on the bones” as it was put. So many comments, so little time but I’ll give it that old I-don’t-really-care-for-your-opinion-anyway try.
1. To Danbuntu, what a shocker that you said “What a horrible article.” Well, if it had been an article to begin with, I suppose it would have been horrible. Since you don’t seem to know the difference between an article and a rant that comes after 4 days sucking face with the command line, then I would have to comment, “what a horrible sense of grammar.” As for the rest, wow I never once thought to go back to Mint 7. And no, that’s not an article, that’s sarcasm. As for why I support the Mint fork over Ubuntu.. it’s because the fork is better. It’s one thing to be all hip-hip hurray for an operating system but another to sound like a Puppy user with an AK-47 and a shortage of anti-depressants.
2. To Cherax, I believe I was trying be chock full of ambiguities. I wasn’t trying to help you or anyone else but it’s nice you believe you are important. As for being “a Microsoft fanboy”…seriously?? Apparently my ambiguous nature confused you from the start, since you missed the whole first line “I am a happy Linux Mint user” entirely. Nor have I been mistaken for a boy since the age of 15 when I got these giant knockers. As for that last supposed insult thrown my way (yes, alluding to a 1st day Linux user mistake WAS hilarious, I’m still weepy eyed) “just forgot to back up your files before choosing the wrong drive partition option?” That was just specific enough to make me wonder if there’s a little bitter truth in there for you.
Alright, now that I have dispatched the idiot brigade, for those of you who asked politely or had some nice advice to offer, your comments will be answered in the same vein.
1. To Opensas, yes I could stick to LTS distros, they are nice to have around…but where would the fun be in that? 😉
2. To Johan Borgstrom, thank you for the suggestion and I did consider Arch Linux after reading some reviews. This was before I got back into doing artwork, which takes up a lot of time and unfortuanately I dont’ have time to spend sweating my life away over the command line. However, having said that, it’s still very much an option if I take a break from my art for a while.
3. To Robenroute and the rest of you expressing your curiosity concerning my exact complaints:
I had Linux Mint 8 installed, which means an underbelly consisting of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (I really should have known better with that name and my luck, but what can I say). The performance issues Roben speaks of were severe with me also. I was having the same embedded video issues of which you wrote. In addition, I had some flash issues that only cropped up intermittently and would disappear (temporarily) with the old uninstall/reinstall trick. I agree that Jaunty and Intrepid were more responsive and more (intuitive?) than Karmic also.
My biggest issues were with mounting. Just typing that sentence made me mad on behalf of the days I spent googling, searching, highlighting, and googling some more for solutions to the various mounting issues that came up. First, I had a USB stick that wouldn’t mount except under ‘sudo.’ I found and implemented a solution for that only to have it start mounting read-only. Found and implemented a solution for that only to have it stop mounting under user. Then it would. Then it wouldn’t. All under the same login session. I can feel my eyelid starting to twitch just remembering.
I got to be quite familiar with /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab, mount and umount, and yes, I did “Read The Fucking Man Pages”…a lot. dmesg | tail figured prominently as well as lsusb and many, many others that are making me want to go on a shooting spree thinking about. NOW CAN YOU ALL UNDERSTAND WHY I WROTE A SHORT RANT? IT WAS TO SAVE YOU ALL! ahem..anyway.
The most fun parts were when I would successfully mount under user but read-only, then to try again and have to mount as root, then have to mount only to have it say that there’s no such thing as /dev/sdb1 in /etc/fstab..oh really? that’s funny I’m looking right at it (eyelid twitch here). Fine, try it again..it mounted, but read-only..great.. I mean seriously, all in THE SAME LOGIN SESSION. Okay need a zen break here. Each instance of non-successful mounting accompanied several searches, re-writing the fstab, rebooting, command line lovin’ and formatting the USB stick to absolutely no avail…so why exactly was I putting myself through this torture? My brother and sister-in-law managed to get some kind of error on their Windoze netbook that I’ve never even heard of, so I needed to install a new OS for them. I got my brother liking Linux a while back, so he asked me to find something suitable and slap it on there. “Okay, no prob.” I say, with that smug little smile I get when I know I can do something many others cannot. No more of that smugness..it attracts bad karma apparently.
Needless to say, I never did get the mounting issues solved on Karmic. I downloaded the .iso for my brother’s netbook and would mount the USB stick (hey wow it mounted, it really mounted!!!) and open USB creator, which would promptly unmount the USB stick, which would then decide to not mount again for 10 more tries, at which time it would mount read only again. (This doesn’t even count the bad-block errors I got within some of those tries also. Then, after all of this, I decide fine..I will download a new distro for my computer. That was great, until I decided to burn the .iso with Brasero..oh goody, now my optical drive won’t mount either. (Popping pills now.) I ended up with an old copy of Dreamlinux that I had from my distro hopping days and with that I decided to reinstall Linux Mint 7. Anything bad I may have reviewed about Dreamlinux I officially retract here.
Needless to say, after days of Googling, I discover I am not even close to being a “pariah” on this issue. Many others have had this same exact issue with Karmic. As far as I’m concerned, if nothing mounts/unmounts/writes properly, that’s a deal breaker in a really big way. I absolutely stand behind my remarks of “massive crap under the surface.” It should be obvious that I’m an Ubuntu fan in general. After all Linux Mint IS Ubuntu, just done right. Since I am an Ubuntu user I might just be able to say “massive crap” and be knowing what I’m talking about. Also it would appear everyone missed the part about how “I certainly hope that Lucid Lynx will be a huge improvement over Karmic Koala.” I believe this would imply that I will be trying it out, otherwise why would I care?
I do hope this addendum was specific enough for everyone. Can I get anyone some gravy for their meat?..apparently, I am not entitled to just rant to vent some anger. Next time, duly noted. I will just start the killing spree instead.
Obsessive Compulsive Linux Disorder 
Hi there Pariah, Rob here (as in Rob en route) 😉
Thanks for the meat added to the bones. I was actually funny to see how quick some people are with slashing an “article”. Just take it as a compliment: they somehow have come to expect great articles from you and didn’t realize they were reading frustration.
I’ve been with Ubuntu a few years now (since Hoary) and although the user interface (Gnome) is making progress (sometime 2 steps forward, one step back), I find the overall stability and useability still debatable. The problem is, I prefer Gnome over KDE and can’t seem to find a decent Gnome distro (with regular releases) that just works.
Anyway, thanks again and keep up the good work! Enjoy your day 🙂
Can we see your “giant knockers”?
yes, but it will cost you..yes, i mean money.
Hello again, Rob, thanks for the comment on my blog. It made me think that I probably should label a post as a rant next time lol.. I agree that sometimes Gnome can be a bit hit or miss but I just can’t bring myself to like KDE. I always (when I used PCLOS) found it to be unstable and freezy (no, it’s just my own word) and no force-quit button (cries) not to mention I can’t do..without the Do. Gnome Do is my best friend. I might be serious. It is so hard to find something that works beautifully out of the box and then have it packaged with Gnome too. I believe the reason behind this is the amount of newbies to Linux who want that familiar feel. When I left Windblows, I never wanted to see anything that remotely reminded me of it so Gnome suited me perfectly.
And if you mean by good work, my usual reviews and tuts, then thanks..if you are referring to the Comedy Central nominee post I wrote in response to all the comments, then…Thanks! lol Drop by anytime, I’m all over the place!
An awful LOT of people have ditched Karmic (and “Helena”) and fled back to the relative, predictable safety of Jaunty (and “Gloria”). My biggest beef with Ubuntu has been their insistence on Beta software (Grub 2, PulseAudio, etc) by default in a distro that’s supposed to be “newbie friendly.” Rawr! Newbies are not to be used as unwitting “lab rats” to test Beta software!
It’s unconscionable to hand newbies that buggy experimental stuff and expect them to be just fine and dandy with it. But even worse when Ubuntu fanatics respond to problems in their beloved, inspired-by-God distro with hostility, as though their religion were under attack or something. Geez, it’s just an operating system, people.
Oh – it’s not a “fix,” but a work-around. For the mounting issue, I have installed PCManFM It’s the file manager that ships with LXDE, but you can download it separately from the repositories. It has a cool little feature where you can navigate to the plugged in USB stick, then click on Tools ->Open Current Folder As Root (enter password). It lets me do all my backups and stuff to external media in a few clicks. Maybe it’s worth a try.
Karmic Xubuntu ships without PulseAudio and has a different set of apps… alot less buggy than it’s siblings. And I’ve heard that Linux Mint Xfce 7 is the bestest, most wonderfulest Xfce distro in the history of ever, so I’m getting ready to install that to see how it compares with Xubuntu Jaunty. Anywayz… don’t let the rabid fanboys get to you. Hopefully reality will intrude enough to show even them that Ubuntu is just a Linux distro instead of a religion.
-Robin
(who is mistaken for a girl a lot and just thinks it’s funny)
Indeed for a newbie based distro to alienate its entire user base by using them as guinea pigs is just wrong. Rawr indeed! On the other hand for some of us Linux is our religion, so I can kind of see the fanaticism there but I will go out of my way to make fun of it, like I dutifully would any other fanatic 😀
I had to sit down and think about whether or not I wanted to try a work around as you suggested, by the way thanks..but as I started to open up good ole Synaptic, I realized my eyelid was twitching again..I think I’ll just wait for Mint 9. I am glad you have had Xfce happiness…I myself can’t deal with it because everytime I try I just think..hmm it looks like a Gnome but it’s quack comes out like a tiny little squeak. lol Not to say anything is wrong with it but it just doesn’t quite do it for me. Good luck with Mint Xfce I hope you like its Minty insides lol.
You say you get mistaken for a girl alot? why so?