Reviews: Quirky Zorin and Boring Ubuntu
If it weren't for all the alarmist articles on "Dirty Cow" there'd hardly be any news at all, however, that didn't stop Zeeshan Hasan from recommending Linux to Bangladesh. Konstantin Ryabitsev has more on Dirty Cow at Linux.com. Elsewhere, Zorin OS 12 Beta is exhibiting issues inherited from Ubuntu while Ubuntu scored a firm "meh" in Monday's Distrowatch Weekly. Additionally, Liam Dawe recommended some scary games that'll put you in the Halloween spirit.
Dedoimedo.com published a review of Zorin OS 12 Beta today testing to see if it's better than its upstream base. He said the desktop was pretty but flat and began hurting his eyes in short order. "It is difficult to distinguish between active and inactive elements, there are no well defined borders within GUI elements, and the whole thing is just too glaring." The distro is still in beta, but it did demonstrate some real problems. Codec and mime-type issue prevented multimedia enjoyment, smartphone and other devices weren't supported well or at all, and GUI elements were misaligned and cut off. Its software manager "is just crap" and the system seemed resource hungry. "Zorin OS 12 is slow. The desktop is sluggish. Everything takes time responding, and sometimes, mouse clicks do not fully register." Dedoimedo ended up concluding, "There's no incentive in really using Zorin."
Perhaps not so coincidentally, Joshua Allen Holm reached nearly the same conclusion today with Ubuntu 16.10. He began, "At first glance, little has changed in Ubuntu 16.10. It looks almost exactly like every other recent release of Ubuntu." He spent most of his article looking at Unity 8, which is still just a preview, and said it does show promise with its early "polish." Holm concluded there was little reason to recommend an upgrade unless you need a fix provided or wish the newer software. In addition, Chin Wong recently upgraded and came to nearly the same exact conclusions.
If you need some help getting into the Halloween spirit this year, Liam Dawe at GamingonLinux.com shared some ideas. Among the Sleep has a "thick atmosphere that will swallow your nerves whole and spit them back out at you." Frictional Games' SOMA is "scary for sure" and Monstrum is "pretty d*mn scary." But Dawe said that Outlast was too scary to even play! Happy Halloween.
While writers are reporting the end of the world due to Dirty Cow, the Dhaka Tribune's Zeeshan Hasan said Bangladesh's "cyber-security agency needs to urgently undertake the task of replacing all the unlicensed/pirated software either with licensed copies of Windows or with free/open source equivalents like Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux, or SUSE Linux."