Ubuntu 13.04 on me high-end box - 'orrible

Almost with regret and personal shame, I present you the worst software review ever. This is an extremely highly negative review of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, with Unity desktop, tested on a laptop with Nvidia graphics card and Broadcom Wireless, covering installation, drivers setup and a short, painful experience, with myriad problems like kernel crashes, Nouveau driver excessive memory and CPU usage, very slow network speed, unbootable desktop after network restart, inconsistent behavior, worrying trends, dashed hopes, and more. You know what, don't even bother to read, it will sour your day. It sure did sour mine.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-ringtail-high-end.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

hahaha!


anyway, i find it somewhat stupid that Ubuntu must release a new release every 6 months, right on the dot, ready or not.

it should be released when it's ready, not because it's been 6 months since the last one.

 

This is why I like Debian 7 so much.. At least it's stable... And it's years between major versions.. my kinda distro..

 

Hope springs eternal.... in twelve months, Canonical will release the next LTS reiteration of Ubuntu and these miseries will hopefully be a thing of the past!

 

Yeah, I think the LTS releases are definitely cleaner and more stable...

 

They are the only ones I can get to run at this point. 11.10, 12.10, and 13.04 have all been useless for me. 12.04 LTS works ok.

 

Yep, when I run Ubuntu, it's 12.04, and for Mint, it's 13. No issues with either of those for me...

 

Recently I decided to fire NVidia and upgrade my system with a cheap MSI H61M-P31 ( W8 ) motherboard (support for uefi and secure uefi, yes!) and the cheapest Intel G2020 cpu with Intel® HD Graphics built-in. (Oh, did I mention plus 8GB memory?)
Connected with powerline ethernet.

Oh man, what a pleasure this configuration is!
*everything* works right out of the box with any recent linux distro. What an Apple-like experience is that!

UEFI got a bad wrap from Windows 8 requirement to be secured, but in non-secure mode it is actually *fantastic": Install Windows 7 AFTER Linux and GRUB2 is still commanding the boot process, unless I decide otherwise. Boot conflicts are history.

 

You made a valiant effort Mrk. Thanks for the rant.

Something's gotta give. Hopefully progress comes from this rolling release business we heard of a few months back. I never saw the point in the 6 month release cycle anyway, always thought Debian's model was more appropriate.

 

That's really good to learn of! Thanks for sharing your experience.

Looks like something that's going to have to be set up for my units. And i was almost resigned to the fact that Windows 8 and Linux dual scenario would become another unpleasant experiment in trial and error to make ready.

 

Apart from kernel crashes, my xubuntu and kubuntu experience as spotless.
I only ask for consistency across the board/releases, that's all.
Either good, good forever, or sucky forever, but not ping pong.
Mrk

 

I use a spare HDD to test new releases, but for every day use i decided to settle down with LTS releases.

 

I have zero experience with Windows 8, but from researching I understand that OpenSuSE has a deal to use Microsoft's security certificate to enable booting in secure UEFI mode. Your distro choices may be more limited if you want secure UEFI, I'm booting in non-secure UEFI mode, since I'm not interested in W8.

By the way, when you plan to install anything with UEFI enabled, you MUST boot the installation medium in UEFI mode. Look at recent installation CD's/DVDś and you might find a /EFI folder, this means that the CD/DVD is able to boot in UEFI mode. If not, it can only boot in bios mode.

 

I've now upgraded 3 out of my 4 machines to Ubuntu 13.04 and no problems with display or network (they all used intel chipsets with open drivers), stability or performance, nor have I had any problems since before 12.04 (which IMHO was the first usuable version of Unity).

Guy in our LUG bought a new Win8 laptop and dual boots with Ubuntu and secure boot running. Took a bit of research, but he has managed to get it working and reliably and he is a pretty generic user rather than a more advanced user like a developer or sys admin.

Give me a shout if you need the info and I ask him for the details.

Cheers, Nick