Updated: June 20, 2016
Picture a list if you will. It's a hate list. On it, you have driving on the left side of the road, Crocs, reality TV, and yes, you guessed it right, distros that fail to boot on my hardware and give me the pleasure of reviewing them. My timetable is planned with precision. And when I set a morning or three up for some rigorous distro testing, there's a load of energy packed in the effort. When a distro fails to boot, it takes a proverbial crap on my emotions.
I wanted to tell you a couple of nice stories, share my experience, help you decide what you ought to run or not. Not meant to be. We have two more failures freshly added to the long and growing list of malfunctioning software products. To wit, rejection report 2.
Korora 23 Coral KDE
This is as bollocky as bollocks go. Korora 23 Gnome actually booted FINE on my G50 machine just the other day. No problem, no sweat. Well, it wouldn't boot from USB, but DVD was fine. Not so with the KDE version. Consistency is such a troubled word. I tried a couple of coasters, even tried a different DVD tray, and then booted the Gnome edition to make sure there's nothing wrong with the hardware. And there isn't.
I can't describe how frustrated I am. It's the same bloody distro with just a few small changes in the visual layout. But then, Fedora boots fine, after a firmware update. Korora Gnome boots fine, but only from DVD. Korora KDE boots not. I am embarrassed to tell people I'm a Linux user. How can this be? We're in 2016. This isn't 1999 anymore. We're not fighting code demons anymore. Seriously, I'm considering starting a petition that says there should be prison time for badly executed and poorly QA-ed distros. The problem is no one cares about petitions.
GeckoLinux
Oh, man. I think at least twenty or thirty individuals emailed me, praising this distro, recommending it with all their heart, love and zeal. I pushed it up my infinite todo list, because I thought it would make for a splendid experience. Based on SUSE Leap, with some extra pimpage. What could possibly go wrong?
It turns out, everything. USB, DVD, you get the same error. MBR thingie not found. What. Are you telling me this distro does not support EFI? What. This is supposed to be a SUSE spin, and that means it should work well on modern hardware. After all, openSUSE did run on the Lenovo laptop, albeit from DVD, because USB is too mainstream. I'm losing it.
I know some of you will say - but you should use X to create the images, because of the block size, and image, and some other nonsense. No. I refuse to accept that burning an image to a DVD or a USB should require any special effort. Wanna go fancy? After the install. Live testing should be as common and simple as possible, even if that means packaging distributions in a format or size that is less than your ideal vision.
Gallery de jour
A few pics to entertain your sad souls:
Conclusion
Here we are, another rejection report. You might also be interested in the first of this kind, and unfortunately, I guarantee, there will be many, many more coming. Because rather than improving, standardizing and becoming more accessible, Linux is becoming less and less relevant daily. It's as if the whole community has lost the will to innovate. How many bi-annual releases can you spin that will be fresh and new and modern?
Slow the cadence down. Pump the brakes. Relax. There's no need for this rushed nonsense just to appear busy and creative. It's better to take a little more time and bake fine and useful products than this random scattering of crap, almost like a meteor rain of brown particles. As always, we go back to consistency. Without it, Linux is doomed.
And so my day is ruined. I wanted to do all the work, the testing, I wanted to capture some forty screenshots and share them with you. Being denied that really pisses me off, and makes me wonder why I bother in the first place. This whole spring is one huge cluster foobar of failures. Horrible. Absolutely horrible. Well, till next time.
P.S. I might try the ABOVE distros with some extra hackology, like additional firmware updates on the laptop and prayer chimes and who knows what else, just to see what they look like, but it will take a special day of benevolence and good mood on my behalf for that to happen, if ever. Still, the report remains as it is. Failure be our fun. Bye bye.
Cheers.