Saturday, May 25, 2013

A Failing Grade for Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail From Dedoimedo

by Dietrich Schmitz

I've been a regular reader of Dedoimedo and have to say, to the best of my recollection, my colleague's  review of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail is the most candid one he has ever written.

There have been times in the past when I disagreed with him in his assessment of various Distros, but this time, I have to take sides with him.  I mean, please, don't hold back on the reader's account.  LOL.  And no, hold back Dedoimedo does not.

Oh, it gets quite colorful.

His diatribe begins with 'A New Definition of Pain: Ubuntu'.  That should give the reader a clue what he has in store for them.

Let's sample some of his more colorful use of the English language shall we?:


On Nouveau

"Remember my praise for improvements in the open-source driver? Well, not anymore, not with the Unity based flavor of Ubuntu, that is. In Ringtail, the performance of this driver was appalling. The system was virtually unusable. Moreover, to make things worse, Canonical has gracefully taken away Unity 2D, taken away a fallback session that uses a basic VESA driver, because that is not chic. And this means you have to eat some brown cakes made from human leftovers, and by leftovers, I mean crap."

On System Core Utilization and Network Speed

"Compiz was taking easily between 120-180% CPU alone. Exacerbating the problem was the network speed, which we will discuss shortly, forcing me to wait many long minutes until the driver was downloaded from the local repo, at approx. 1/50 the expected rate.
And so I waited, like the little masochist that I am."

On Restarting

"Indeed, I foolishly thought restarting the network might solve the problems. Yes, open command line and run the init script with the restart argument. That's all. Right. You've all done it hundreds of times without any problems whatsoever.

What it did was kill the desktop. Ubuntu then threw an error how it encountered a serious problem and all that nonsense. Restart lightdm, no help. Reboot. Unbootable desktop. I am not joking. That's right, fellas. Restarting the network ruined the X configuration. At this point, I totally gave up."

On Taking Ownership of the Issues (by Canonical)

"For some reason, it's everyone's fault except the people making and packaging the software. They are pristine, innocent little angels, and they shed tears that cure cancer. Only it seems to me, the reality is somewhat different. Starting with Lucid onwards, which was absolutely rock solid, stable, fast, and everything worked just splendid, on this very same hardware, things are getting progressively worse. In the rush to complete with the already rabid market, QA is dumped down the drain as second best, when it should be the top priority."

 On Quality Assurance

"Non-LTS releases should NOT be made available to general public. Not the way they are nowadays. They should be labeled strictly beta. The only thing they manage to achieve is cause harm, to users, to enthusiasts, to people who wish to promote Linux, and to the company itself. I dread to think what will happen once Wayland and Mir come along. This is going to be C.L.U.S.T.E.R. foobar of colossal magnitude. I seriously consider not testing the next release. Just skipping it."

On Unity: The 'Cherry de la Turd'

"Even more stupendously stupefying is that Kubuntu 13.04 and Xubuntu 13.04 Ringtails are probably among the best, most polished versions of said distros released, ever. Yup. I was almost tempted to grant a perfect score to each one of them. My simple conclusion would be that Unity adds its own layer of problems that is not present in the other two. And this make our problem a tad more problematic. Awesome."

Ubuntu's Overall Score

"Overall, the Unity-based flavor of Raring Ringtail, I repeat the Unity-based flavor, not Kubuntu or Xubuntu, which are quite alright really, deserves 0/10."


Seriously Folks, I left much out, but I think it becomes pretty clear after reading Dedoimedo's review in its entirety that Raring Ringtail suffers from multiple serious quality control issues.  As a result, the reviewer gives this product a FAIL, having a score total of 0/10.  Wow.

So, consider yourself warned: avoid Ubuntu 13.04 like the proverbial plague.

-- Dietrich

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