Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

[wizard10000]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

Giving it a C so far.

My netbook was a tad quicker using 9.10/KDE 4.4.3 - Lucid also appears to use about 25% more memory.

On the 64-bit desktop RAM usage is also up but I can't tell whether the machine is any slower - but the desktop is an overclocked Core i7-920 and runs fairly strong anyway.

[abalone]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

Gave it a B... though that's definitely allowing for beta-ness.

• Shutdown/restart often hangs with "acpid: exiting" message on tty1
• Apport says "serious kernel problem" after every boot
• X crashes on resume from hibernate (it's never worked in the first place, though)
• With console resolutions > 640x480, X sometimes fails into "Low graphics mode"
• Low graphics mode doesn't seem to work properly? (It never did; no console login from there, no actual low graphics session)
• In some sessions, KDE is unaware of my dualhead setup: then dialogues appear "between" physical screens, windows are maximized over both screens, and so on
• I'm going through the KDE Look feed in Akregator and opening browser tabs (in Akregator) to download some icons and stuff, and Kontact crashes

Many things I have not yet tested.

[hunkirdowne]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

Gave it a B... though that's definitely allowing for beta-ness.

• Shutdown/restart often hangs with "acpid: exiting" message on tty1
• Apport says "serious kernel problem" after every boot

<snip>
Many things I have not yet tested.

Personally, I think you are being too kind. I am not having nearly the level of problems you are having but if I were I would think these issues should be addressed at the alpha or early beta stage. Certainly with beta-2 reaching maturity these issues should be addressed. I don't think I would be very happy with 640x480 resolution (not these days anyway ;-).

There are still bugs to squash but at the rate that I've seen updates coming down the pike I would not expect there to be too many major bugs (if any) come release date. I would highly recommend filing your bug reports into Launchpad if you have not already done so.

Just from one user to another (I'm not a developer), thanks for participating in the beta. I have to admit I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. I think the developers have done a fine job and am patiently waiting resolution of some issues that are affecting me personally (they are confirmed to affect other users as well per Launchpad's bug tracking).
[/list]

[andystmartin]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

C

Many things are working great. A couple of things are horrible, though.
* Plymouth splash screen with nvidia video card looks extremely ugly. Not a good first impression.
* Akonadi frequently fails and seemingly serves no useful purpose.
* UbuntuOne integration does not work with KDE.
* Frequent crashes of systray and other apps.

[hunkirdowne]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

C
* Plymouth splash screen with nvidia video card looks extremely ugly. Not a good first impression.

Not your shade of blue or does it look distorted? I've got an old nVidia card in this laptop (NV11 [GeForce2 Go] per lshw) and everything seems OK other than the fact that desktop effects are out of the question.

[andystmartin]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

When I say "ugly", I don't mean "I don't like blue, I'd rather see purple."

What I mean is the color map has about 16 entries, the resolution is extremely low, and there big, ugly stripes of colors to with bad dithering to transition from one color to the next. This is apparently a known problem with some nVidia cards.

[abalone]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

• Gave it a B... though that's definitely allowing for beta-ness.
  

  • Shutdown/restart often hangs with "acpid: exiting" message on tty1
  • Apport says "serious kernel problem" after every boot

  
  <snip>
  Many things I have not yet tested.

  Personally, I think you are being too kind. I am not having nearly the level of problems you are having but if I were I would think these issues should be addressed at the alpha or early beta stage. Certainly with beta-2 reaching maturity these issues should be addressed. I don't think I would be very happy with 640x480 resolution (not these days anyway ;-).
  
  There are still bugs to squash but at the rate that I've seen updates coming down the pike I would not expect there to be too many major bugs (if any) come release date. I would highly recommend filing your bug reports into Launchpad if you have not already done so.
  
  Just from one user to another (I'm not a developer), thanks for participating in the beta. I have to admit I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. I think the developers have done a fine job and am patiently waiting resolution of some issues that are affecting me personally (they are confirmed to affect other users as well per Launchpad's bug tracking).

Did a clean install, and it's got more problems than my upgrade. Now I can't suspend to RAM twice. The second and all subsequent times it always wakes up automatically right after suspending. Why, if it works the first time? There's nothing in the pm-suspend.log to indicate what causes the immediate wake-up. Sigh! It may be a hardware defect. I have caused much mayhem.

[MichaelDRennie]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I've used Kubuntu 10.04 for a bit, and it just doesn't seem as usable as openSUSE 11.2.

Maybe the final release will be a little better than Beta 2, but I don't see enough improvement to get me to switch back to Kubuntu.

I'm not trying to badmouth Kubuntu by recommending openSUSE. I have tried both extensively, and I honestly feel like openSUSE does KDE much better.

[hunkirdowne]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

Smashing a couple posts here ... please read on.

I've used Kubuntu 10.04 for a bit, and it just doesn't seem as usable as openSUSE 11.2.

Maybe the final release will be a little better than Beta 2, but I don't see enough improvement to get me to switch back to Kubuntu.

I'm not trying to badmouth Kubuntu by recommending openSUSE. I have tried both extensively, and I honestly feel like openSUSE does KDE much better.

...I do not necessarily disagree, but...

MichaelDRennie,
When the differences are so important you want to switch distribution then you can surely give us some examples?

...I agree with Teunis in that I would like to see (or at least read about) some examples.

I've used OpenSUSE and previously SuSE back in the day. I will say that package management has drastically improved over the years but still not quite as strong as Debian and derivatives. I confess I'm a bit of a command line junky so my preference tends to be biased in that direction rather than the look and feel of the graphical environment. That said, there are functional reasons why I like certain graphical features that makes me like KDE a little better than Gnome these days (not having tested pre-Gnome3 stuff -- in a 'wait and see' mode here). But I have always thought SuSE (or now, OpenSUSE) had better default eye-candy, look and feel, etc. Nevertheless, due to personal bias as mentioned above, I have preferred Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distros with KDE/Xfce/Gnome desktop environs.

But I can certainly keep an open mind.

[claydoh]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I've used Kubuntu 10.04 for a bit, and it just doesn't seem as usable as openSUSE 11.2.

Maybe the final release will be a little better than Beta 2, but I don't see enough improvement to get me to switch back to Kubuntu.

I'm not trying to badmouth Kubuntu by recommending openSUSE. I have tried both extensively, and I honestly feel like openSUSE does KDE much better.

I second the call for what is different/better/worse between distros. I never seem to see this ever spelled out in any concrete way whatsoever.

A better comparo with suse would be be Opensuse 11.3 pre-release versions as the drivers, kernels, and apps are similar.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

......
I second the call for what is different/better/worse between distros. I never seem to see this ever spelled out in any concrete way whatsoever.
....

Such an evaluation is SO SUBJECTIVE as to be worthless, except in the most generalized ways. Distro A runs KDE, distro B runs GNOME. Distr A uses Upstart. Distro B uses the classic inittab. Distro A automatically configures the video chip. Distro B requires the users run Xapp to configure the video chip. Distro A has usbautomout. Distro B requires the user to manually mount external storage devices using the mount command, and remove them using umount, etc....

What usually ends up happening is that the reviewer rags on Distro A because it doesn't have feature X, or because its default background "doesn't look pretty", etc....

[claydoh]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

yes, but then this could then be politely pointed out . At least then perhaps we can see what other's expectations are (if they come from another distro) and perhaps use that info as points to consider when deciding the direction of the distro.

The real problem is how do we define a standard of how things are labled. "Suse is more stable" or what constitutes "kubuntu has bad packaging" and how do you define "Arch is so much easier to maintain" and so on.

But from my own personal travels, it all seems to boil down to :

A) Package management
B) Wallpaper (artwork)

And that's it. Really.

Kubuntu have this perception of being some big behemoth distro that has to be as big and nifty as Ubuntu, but with a "k" added to it . Well we ain't that at all, and I don't think the intention is to be that big.

I'd better stop before I stray even more off-topic.....

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

.....
The real problem is how do we define a standard of how things are labled. "Suse is more stable" or what constitutes "kubuntu has bad packaging" and how do you define "Arch is so much easier to maintain" and so on.
....

Exactly. I read reports of how "unstable", or "not ready for prime time" or some such cutsy remark, that Kubnuntu 9.10 is and then I consider how stable my Lucid Lynx is and I wander what those folks are doing to their system to hose it so badly? On this forum we see problems because that's why most people register for -- to get a problem solved. We see folks having trouble because their hardware isn't supported (too old, too new, to much of an outlier, etc...). Whereas Linux used to run beautifully on older machines now it is problematic in regards to videos. ATI, for example, no longer supports their drivers for their older video chips. The old drivers won't recognize the new kernels and the new drivers won't recognize the older chips. So folks running ATI's R300s, 400s and 500 chips are out of luck except for VESA only.

[claydoh]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

wow, not even the open drivers work? My really old Radeon Mobility 7500 has had good support there since at least Jaunty, and my newer built-in Radeon HD3200 has desktop effects and HDMI audio with the open drivers in lucid now. A gap between the closed and open drivers in terms of chipset support is not good.

Anyway, I refrain from slagging other distros for the reasons in the above post. My Chakra install is good enough, but the gui package manager is simply aweful for me as it always crashes, literally every time I run i, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to update my system, with it. I don't always want to use the command line for package management, so in my case it is an issue. Does that make Arch awful? far from it. In any case, I see either in their forum or from my personal usage, most of the same problems found here, and I am sure in other KDE distros have them as well.

[MoeNeigh]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I'll give it an A. The open drivers work fine for my nvidia GeForce 6150SE now with Lucid. Boot time is very good also.