Leaves are falling, it’s okay to wear costumes for a day this month, and Ubuntu 9.10 will be released under the name Karmic Koala. Before I get into some review, it’s hard for me to anticipate this release because of the recent history with this distribution. Over time I’ve seen Ubuntu improve in many ways, but there are plenty of regressions and changes each release that make upgrading an option to be considered.
Please remember this review is done during beta testing a week before release. While it does represent how the development process is coming along, it’s not the release date. We are pretty harsh on the Beta because that’s what it’s here for.
Things that aren’t fixed yet
We don’t upgrade because we have some kind of intrinsic joy of numbers getting larger, or at least I would hope. “A tree is truly measured by it’s fruit,” and Ubuntu is no exception. What’s the point in upgrading if it doesn’t fix your problem? If you’re upgrading for one of the following reasons, you might not want to even bother until they actually fix it.
NO Multiple Desktop Backgrounds
Yes, we all want to have separate wallpapers for each side of our cube. Of course, you’ve got that nice Compiz plugin already there to let you configure mutliple desktops, but it doesn’t work. The reason is because of how Nautilus (default file browser for GNOME) and the window manager fight over who gets to draw the background, and there appears to be a standoff between who should properly implement this.
NO Better Flash Performance
While it’s true that Flash will work out of the box, which hasn’t always been the case in the past, it’s still going to cap your CPU usage while attempting to watch Flash based video. Players with HD content like Hulu will cause that usage graph to max out one of your cores. Since this is a closed-source component, it’s not the fault of Ubuntu, but Adobe for shafting the open community.
NO PulseAudio is Still Horrible
I’m somewhat inclined to be more of a jerk to the PulseAudio developers, since I know they have been pretty irritated with other developers talking crap about their audio system. While I am going to mostly rip on PulseAudio, at least this Ubuntu release makes some use of it’s advanced capabilities. Past releases have shipped with it as default, but had no way to utilize features like per-application volume, or volume amplification. While this release at least makes it possible to use those features, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have more audio playback problems compared to before. A previously fixed 2 year old bug that rattled some ears while making irritating speaker beeps also came back. (More on audio later too)
NO update-apt-xapian-index is Still Horrible
Users complaining of high amounts of CPU usage and vastly degraded performance due to the update-apt-xapian-index will be sad to know that it’s still there. The thing that irritates me here is it appears to not be warranted. Many other packages hook into when packages are installed or removed and make updates to indexes, but instead this costly and irritating daemon will interrupt your workflow.
It’s interesting to see what’s happening with the latest Ubuntu (9.10, Karmic Koala), which is in