Back to Kubuntu after a long time, feels good.

[multanihl]

Hey folks,

I stayed away from Kubuntu after I heard a lot of bad stuff with the release of 8.10 - I've got one desktop running 8.04.4 and will probably stay there (it's a five-year-old machine anyway), and when I briefly tried out 8.10 on a second desktop, it seemed like everything was still kind of half-baked.

In the intervening time, I moved the second machine over to OpenSUSE 11.x, which it's still dual-booting with XP, and got a netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix (now they call it something different, but I don't remember the proper name anymore). All of that's been fine, but I bought a little $300 Acer machine to use as a media box, and I thought I'd give Kubuntu a try again.

All I can say is, what a difference the time has made! There's a good variety of plasma widgets, much, MUCH better integration of GTK apps (Firefox, GIMP, and Inkscape integrated seamlessly), and I like KPackageKit as much as the Ubuntu Software Center, although I still find myself drifting into apt-get when I know what I want....

I'd even go so far as to say that Kubuntu rates higher than OpenSUSE for me, and OpenSUSE is a very "KDE-leaning" distro (for lack of a better description). Everything works well enough in OpenSUSE, but it seemed to me like YaST was kind of bolted on top of a lot of the other base KDE functionality, although I'm sure that it gives power users a lot more control right at their fingertips for administration.

What I'm curious to hear about, is what it was like for those of you that stuck with Kubuntu over the past couple of years? Even in a few recent posts here I am seeing complaints about KDE 4 (one person posted with a title about abandoning Kubuntu, but that just seemed like flaming to me), but from my experience with 10.10, they've more or less stamped out the bugs to create a really smooth distro. They even brought back the Graphic EQ in Amarok, which I had sorely missed.

Anyone else have a similar story? I've only been on 10.10 for a week now, but so far, it's been nothing but a positive experience!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Back to Kubuntu after a long time, feels good.

I bought an Acer Aspire One A0521-3782 Netbook for my wife (she's going to buy me a bracelet ), and I put Kubuntu 10.04 (kubuntu-desktop, not the netbook version) on it using wubi.exe. It runs as fast as Win7 does on that box, if not faster, and it is about as fast, running a single app, as my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E dual core with 2.6GHz CPU's, which surprised me. The Sony begins to show the muscle when several apps are open at the same time.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Back to Kubuntu after a long time, feels good.

I bought an Acer Aspire One A0521-3782 Netbook for my wife (she's going to buy me a bracelet )

Last time I bought my wife a computer, she bought me diamond earrings! Looks like they're in the same club!

[Snowhog]

Re: Back to Kubuntu after a long time, feels good.

What I'm curious to hear about, is what it was like for those of you that stuck with Kubuntu over the past couple of years? Even in a few recent posts here I am seeing complaints about KDE 4 (one person posted with a title about abandoning Kubuntu, but that just seemed like flaming to me), but from my experience with 10.10, they've more or less stamped out the bugs to create a really smooth distro. They even brought back the Graphic EQ in Amarok, which I had sorely missed.

Anyone else have a similar story? I've only been on 10.10 for a week now, but so far, it's been nothing but a positive experience!

Welcome to KFN.

Well, I started using Linux (Kubuntu) in March of 2007. Then, it was Edgy Eft and KDE 3.x. Back then, it was on a Sony Vaio laptop running a Pentium CPU - 333Mhz IIRC. My first issue was getting the proper packages (didn't know which ones) so I could get commercial DVDs playing. Rog131 was, as he still is, very helpful and got me through that hurdle. I've stuck with Kubunu and progressed through each new distro, upto Maverick Meerkat 10.10, which is installed on my new-ish Toshiba Satellite P105-S6147 laptop. I actually dual-boot, and have Lucid Lynx 10.04 as the second OS. My practice is to run a dual-boot system, replacing the older release of the two with the latest 'final' release. In this way, I always have a know stable OS, should something untoward happen in the new one.

Maverick has been an absolute pleasure. I'm using KDE 4.5.4 on it with no problems at all. On Lucid I have KDE 4.5.x I think - would need to boot into it to verify. But Lucid also is a very solid installation. In both, all works as one expects. I have direct rendering and compositing active and functional. Note in my sig line, I just have an Intel Integrated GPU - nothing fancy by anyones standards. But, I'm not a gamer, and it does for me everything I need/want. I'm happy.

Amarok, since the move to the version 2 series has, for me (and others), been a serious disapointment. I'm not one to collect digital music - mps, ogg, etc - and have a reasonable collection of audio CDs. The version 2 series of Amarok just doesn't deal with audio CDs in a stable way at all. What is sad, to me, is that the developers claim that Amarok is designed for 'all your music needs' and yet, they seem to have decided not to work on making it useful for audio CDs. The 1.4 version of Amarok worked with audio CDs. Many of us lament the lose of that functionality. In fact, I don't have Amarok installed - I removed it. I have qmmp installed instead. It too, doesn't (yet) work with audio CDs, but it is being upgraded to do so. I could install other apps - VLC, bangarang, others - which handle audio CDs, but I'm waiting on the next upgrade to qmmp. It's a very nice little app.

Some of use; okay, maybe a lot of us here, find it humorus and unhelpful, those 'members' who join just to post a single "I don't like" post putting Kubuntu/KDE/Plasma down, with little or nothing about their equipment or what they tried. The post and leave, in many cases, never to be heard from again. These types of posts serve no purpose at all. :P

[multanihl]

Re: Back to Kubuntu after a long time, feels good.

Amarok, since the move to the version 2 series has, for me (and others), been a serious disapointment. I'm not one to collect digital music - mps, ogg, etc - and have a reasonable collection of audio CDs. The version 2 series of Amarok just doesn't deal with audio CDs in a stable way at all. What is sad, to me, is that the developers claim that Amarok is designed for 'all your music needs' and yet, they seem to have decided not to work on making it useful for audio CDs. The 1.4 version of Amarok worked with audio CDs. Many of us lament the lose of that functionality. In fact, I don't have Amarok installed - I removed it. I have qmmp installed instead. It too, doesn't (yet) work with audio CDs, but it is being upgraded to do so. I could install other apps - VLC, bangarang, others - which handle audio CDs, but I'm waiting on the next upgrade to qmmp. It's a very nice little app.

Some of use; okay, maybe a lot of us here, find it humorus and unhelpful, those 'members' who join just to post a single "I don't like" post putting Kubuntu/KDE/Plasma down, with little or nothing about their equipment or what they tried. The post and leave, in many cases, never to be heard from again. These types of posts serve no purpose at all. :P

I still use Amarok 1.4 on my other desktop (running Kubuntu/Hardy), and even then it seemed like Amarok didn't really like CDs much. My drive would spin up and before it would play the first track, it would read through the disc track-by-track and seemed to take a lot of time. Since all of my digital music is ripped from my own CDs (call me old-fashioned) it could be kind of tedious, but nothing unbearable. Fortunately, once I got the OGGs onto the hard drive Amarok has been great for playback for me. I couldn't begin to explain why, but music (whether OGG or MP3, or even CD) just seems to sound better to me on Linux than Windows/Mac. Must be the audio drivers....

As an aside, OpenSUSE used Kaffeine as the default CD player, for which it works fine. I'd be interested to know why the Kubuntu team went with Dragon Player for the default media player instead of Kaffeine, since I'm still using Kaffeine for video playback under 8.04.

I guess I should also list the specs of my Maverick machine. Fry's Electronics had a good deal a year or so ago and I got an Acer Aspire X1300 w/o monitor or peripherals. $300 got me:

Athlon X2-64 7450 Dual-core processor @ 2.4Ghz
3GB RAM
320 GB HD
16x DVD Burner (Lite-On, I think)
Integrated Card Reader
Integrated NVidia 8200 with HDMI-out

It had Windows Vista SP1 installed by default, and with no OS media supplied with the machine, I didn't feel like risking dual-booting. I used Acer's utility to make a factory restore set (3 DVDs worth of stuff, and mostly bloatware I'm sure!). Then I swapped the HD with a fresh 500GB Western Digital and stored away the OEM drive in the box that the 500GB came in. I initially installed Ubuntu/Jaunty on it, upgraded it to Karmic since, and had been using it like that for a while.

It's been great as an HTPC because it's small, quiet, and with the HDMI-out it's no sweat connecting to my TV. With a wireless mouse/keyboard, it's very convenient in the living room

I've been playing with Ubuntu since Feisty, but I've always leaned toward Kubuntu and KDE (maybe because I'd been so used to Windows?). One of the main reasons I wanted to try Kubuntu again after over a year using GNOME on my little media machine was because of the upcoming shift to Unity desktop with Ubuntu 11.04. I'm fine with it on my netbook, but I don't think I'll really want to use it as a full desktop environment. Of course, I don't know what tweaks/changes they will be making between now and April, but if the current netbook version of Unity is any indication, I think I will prefer to stick with Kubuntu on the desktop.