Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop (DistroWatch Weekly #480)

Nobody will ever accuse Jesse Smith of doing a less than honest review. His review of Ubuntu 12.04 for DistroWatch Weekly was very positive. His review of 12.10 is incredibly negative. I wonder how much hate he'll get from the Ubuntu community over this review. Hopefully not too much. Sadly my experience with 12.10 was also not good at all and things that worked in 12.04 (an LTS release) definitely are broken in 12.10, something he also experienced.

Also, please note that Jesse actually installs the distros he reviews. He writes real reviews based on actual, real world usage models. For the one or two people who accused me of being negative about reviews... sorry, no. Jesse is an example of someone who writes good reviews on a consistent basis. Oh, and yes, more of his reviews are positive than negative.

I upgraded to 12.10 and it has so far been a positive experience. I did the upgrade mostly to get to GIMP 2.8. I use my desktop for web access an other relatively light work. Everything that worked for me in 12.04 runs just fine in 12.10 and the screen placement of the top menu bar seems more accurate. Generally speaking, I have grown to like Unity desktop and prefer it to most others (especially W8 metro/modern). Maybe I just got lucky but I am satisfied with the upgrade.

"It works for me" is never a valid response to someone who is having problems. I have no doubt it works for you, jerruw42. However, I have the same NVidia chipset in my three year old desktop that Jesse found to be problematic with video. Different hardware == different results. For Jesse and I it came down to same hardware == equally bad results.

I agree that Jesse always does honest reviews - though I must say that I miss Caitlyn's inimitable review style on DW. While I experienced no issues installing 12.10, it did exhibit some minor compiz strangeness and was indeed noticeably slower than 12.04, as almost everyone has reported.

What I do find odd is that Jesse's hardware appears to be unusually slow in some regard (60+ minutes to install Slackware?). He has explained that it takes ~10 minutes per gb of data copied to hd. Does that sound normal?

Jesse is one of the best (as is Caitlyn, of course).

> 60+ minutes to install Slackware?

That's not unusual if you have to prepare the partitions. If the partitions are ready and formatted, then it seems high.

Yes, in my own experience, fiddling around with/deciding on the precise partition scheme can easily be the most time consuming part of an install,

I'd suspect he might need to turn on DMA or 32-bit I/O. And might not, but that's what I'd look at first.

With Slackware the biggest consumer of time, for me,is package selection. If you're going to make the extra effort to run Slackware might as well customize it completely.