14 DAY TRIAL // The elementary OS team recently released version 0.3.1 of their operating system, and I took it for a ride. As it turns out, there are a lot of problems out of the box, and it's becoming increasingly annoying to even consider keeping it for a longer time than I need to.
After the launch of elementary OS 0.3.1, I figured I should really give it a go and review this latest version. I used and reviewed previous versions before and I already knew that I was going to like it. I mean, what's not to like? It has a beautiful desktop and a lot of cool features that you can only find in this OS. As it turns out, I had some major issues in the first couple of days of usage, and it's unlikely that these are the only ones.
I never had any significant problems with the previous version of elementary OS, with one exception. I tried at some point to get a new kernel or a new version for X.org, and it crashed, but that was pretty much it. It might be just a problem with my system (which is unlikely), but after doing some searching, it looks like I'm not the only one.
Simple problems that should not exist
The first problem I encountered was right after the installation finished and I rebooted. I expected to see the login screen, but instead I got the infamous black screen. After a short investigation, it looks like I encountered the famous "nomodeset" problem, and you can find a good description of it on askubuntu. None of the regular solutions seemed to work and it took me about 30 minutes to figure it out.
Today I wanted to play some games, so I went and installed Steam. You might think that is easy to do since this is based on Ubuntu, but no. Some of the dependencies needed for Steam don't exist in the repositories or have different versions. I had to waste another 30 minutes to understand why this is happening. I finally got Steam to run and figured that I should get some newer drivers. That was a bad idea.
I have an Intel i5 processor and a GeForce GTX 760. It's not a particularly powerful PC, quite ordinary, I dare say. I got the new driver easily enough, and I left to get some lunch. The system entered standby, but when I returned it wasn't working anymore, and I had to reboot.
Now Steam doesn't work any longer, and it gives an error that I can't bypass, at least for now, and I just found out that System Settings is not opening either. At this point, I'm afraid to reboot, and I'm trying to get this done before it crashes altogether.
This all happened only after a couple of days of usage. Tomorrow the review for elementary OS will be up, and I really hope I have better news until then.