In the interests of completeness, Igor Ljubuncic over at his Dedoimedo blog posted a fairly negative
review of Rebecca. He had problems with it, which comes as no surprise considering this was his setup:
The setup
I decided to try Rebecca on my Nvidia-powered HP laptop, a 2010 system, rather than the standard quad-boot T61, which I most often use for testing. The reason is, the Pavilion box already runs a dual-boot of Qiana and Windows 7 internally, and it's a pretty robust setup.
However, I did not want to displace the internal installation just yet, so I hooked up an external 640GB disk, which contains some five - used to be six - other distros, mostly older attempts from two years back or so. This means we will be testing a seven-boot setup and Nvidia drivers instead of the more usual SSD quad-boot combo. Not bad.
I'm not going to even bother elaborate on all the potential issues a setup like that is likely to experience. Suffice to say, using a different machine than you normally use for testing; and doing an install to an external drive in a seven-boot (!) arrangement is bound to introduce some difficulties 99% (or better) of all users trying or using Rebecca will never experience.
And troubles Igor had.
Unfortunately, I can't agree much with the validity of some of his conclusions:
Conclusion
What happened? I do not know. Maybe I was just being unlucky. Maybe my HP desktop sucks, and you should avoid Broadcom in Linux. But that's really a lame excuse, if you think about it, because both Qiana and Windows 7, resident on the internal hard disk, behave quite well. Which makes Rebecca a big disappointment.
I don't have a good way of glossing over the issues I've encountered during the preparation of this review. Mint 17.1 did not perform well in my tests. For a range of reasons, package management and desktop customizations were quite horrible, with crashes and hangs. Not acceptable. Then, there are a few other smaller issues that can and should be easily fixed. Overall, though, I can't recommend Rebecca. You'd better stay with Qiana. I will be doing some more testing in the future, for sure, but at the time being, you might skip this. Grade, 6/10.
Cheers.
To me, it sounds like he just got a bad install. External USB hard drives (which he seems to gloss over) are somewhat notorious for having sporadic problems with Linux installations. Hardly surprising since most of them were not engineered to be used as the regular boot device on a production system.
So ok...lets see...
Igor:
- Doesn't really know what happened
- Installed on an external drive - but dismisses that since Mint 17.0 is running correctly on the internal drive in the same machine. Apples and oranges...
- Didn't bother to try a second installation in case there were timing or other issues with the external drive he was using
- Didn't bother to try to install it in a sane manner rather than as a "cool" 7-boot science fair project
Yeah, ok...fine. He's entitled to his opinion I suppose. But his 'test' was hardly anything I consider "good enough" to go by.
The only reason I bothered to post this is because Dedoimedo is a very well-respected and widely read blog. And it's reputation is genuinely earned. It's a very good place to "learn a lot about a lot" as it's byline says. So when I see a really half-assed review that glosses over so many obvious issues with how it was done - and then reaches the conclusions it does, I have to say something. Not because I don't respect Igor and Dedoimedo. But rather because I do. And in this case, his review of Rebecca was not up to his usual high standards.
And the only reason I've bothered to post this
here rather than as a comment on Dedoimedo is because Igor's blog isn't provisioned to accept user comments.
Which is fine. I've said what I have to say to the people I want to say it to.
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