Everybody happy?

[cloggie]

I don't know if this topic should be put here, but otherwise someone will put it in the right place.
But my question is if everyone is happy with Feisty so far?
I upgraded from 6.10 last week, and actually feel a little bit sorry for doing this. Maybe I've done it too early, just to get most of the problems out of this new version, but I am a sucker for new versions, and cut myself this time. I don't think my system is as solid as with the previous version of Kubuntu. Had to uninstall Firefox yesterday and install Swiftfox. The reason for this is my email, being AIM, kept crashing Firefox as well as Opera since Aim upgraded her email program.
Then automatic recognising my daughters Ipods, which was easy in 6.10, but now it gives me a lot of headaches. And these things just gives me a little uneasy feeling.
Is it just me, or are there others as well with this feeling?
I just wanted to mention this. I want to keep working with Kubuntu, because I like this distro, but I sure hope that with the next release at least this ndiswrapper problem will be solved. Because again, it still took me awhile to get my wireless going.

Sorry, don't want to look like bashing this version, but I wish I hadn't upgraded yet...........

[penguin.ch]

Re: Everybody happy?

Is it just me, or are there others as well with this feeling?

You are not alone

http://www.penguin.ch/dokuwiki/doku....version_policy

Birdy aka littleDr House

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Postscript: reference updated

[MoonRise]

Re: Everybody happy?

Actually I'm quite pleased. Yes I know a lot of people have had their share of problems. Fortunately I wasn't one of them, otherwise I guess I'd be feeling the same way. Really I'm waiting for GG with KDE4. That is where I think we'll know how Kubuntu has matured or not.

[dibl]

Re: Everybody happy?

Except for playing with the live CD of Dapper, Edgy was the first Linux that I ever installed. So there is the perspective ...

Feisty is superior, on my hardware. I admit that I bought and built my platform with Linux in mind. That said, Feisty is better. I have Kubuntu Feisty 32-bit on one SATA drive, and Ubuntu Feisty low-latency 64-bit on another. Both are stable, and I am able to be productive with my chosen applications on each. It took awhile to discover how to get Beryl to run on the 64-bit side -- secret recipes and all of that.

I wouldn't consider going back -- this is a great OS!

[MoonRise]

Re: Everybody happy?

I wouldn't consider going back -- this is a great OS!

Yep, I agree.

[lowey23]

Re: Everybody happy?

I agree with dibl and Moonrise. I have been using Kubuntu since Hoary Hedgehob. Each subsequent release seems to get better and better. I have had my share of problems, but most of these have been due to my lack of knowledge about how the system works. These forums have been immensely helpful to me, and I now have a nice little system running Feisty AND BERYL (thank you, dibl).

My stepson has actually given it a shot and is running World of Warcraft under Wine. He says it runs better with Linux than it did on Windows. He won't go back either. My daughter is using Feisty for a couple of months to give it a try (her husband won't, though). She is liking it a lot, and my Beryl desktop blew her away. I have to go over to her house and show her how to install it.

Anyway, enough babbling. All I can say, cloggie, is to stick with it. It can be frustrating at times, but you learn heaps and it's a real buzz when you eventually sort out your problem.

Just my 2c. (Actually today, $1.02c)

Lowey

[gnowak]

Re: Everybody happy?

Yes, I am pretty happy. I upgraded from Edgy to Feisty one day after the official release. It was on my T40p IBM laptop, so it went really smooth. I think many bugs disappeared because of the KDE upgrade. I had some problems though, because the repositories were broken for opera and stuff like that, but it were minor problems.

dibl wrote:
I admit that I bought and built my platform with Linux in mind.

Do you mind to share your hardware configuration? And maybe tell about how and what you are looking for, when you buy Linux hardware?

Thanks.

[javierrivera]

Re: Everybody happy?

I'm with UnicornRider.

I'm been mostly happy, but some things like the samba/kcontrol msxxx proxy bug are quite irritating.

Also I feel that much more care is given to details in gnome than in Kde. Of course it could be very well be a complete biased view as I don't use gnome (I play with it sometimes, but no real work).

Anyway, I always start updating the machines that I feel that are safer (home computer), and let the important ones (work computer) and the hardware "sensible" ones to the last.

Javier.

[cloggie]

Re: Everybody happy?

Okay, thanks to all of you for your reply.
And like I said, I don't meant to do this to bash Kubuntu, because I want to stay with it. So I just have to work on it to figure things out. and maybe it is just me with a wrong feeling, also possible.
8)

[IgnorantGuru]

Mostly happy

Thus far I have installed Feisty on three machines from scratch. I tried upgrading one machine first but the upgrade failed with an error about Samba - killed the system. I don't have much confidence in upgrades anyway so I was prepared to copy my /home folder and install from scratch.

My one machine is a desktop with AMD64 with a GeForce 6200. I stuck with 32 bit as I did in Edgy to avoid conflicts, though I may experiment with the 64 bit version on another partition at some point. As with Edgy, both the LiveCD and the Alternate (post-install) booted into a black screen. Fix (same with Edgy) is to get to a shell and install the nvidia drivers. All the hardware in this machine was purchased with Linux in mind and built from scratch.

Only problems I encountered:
The initial install of postfix was bad, couldn't get it working. Uninstalling and reinstalling it corrected it.

The default install of OpenOffice crashed with all my spreadsheets (on all three machines). Long story short: uninstalling all the OO packages and reinstalling the same ones from the default repos corrected this problem on all three machines.

Other than those issues, and a few minor things stemming from app upgrades (no fault of Kubuntu), it runs noticably faster. Programs load faster and the desktop is more responsive. This was already a fast machine so I was surprised that there was this much room for improvement. Stability has been excellent as with Edgy. NFS seems smoother. Only slowdown is ejecting a CD/DVD - takes longer to umount it.

---------

Also installed it on my HP NX6125 laptop, AMD64 (but running 32 bit because wireless drivers are only available 32 bit). ATI driver installed okay but works worse than in Edgy - cannot shutdown, reboot, or log out a user without crashing. (Workaround I found: do a Ctrl-Alt-F1, login, and sudo poweroff). Suspend and hibernate non-functional. This was also true in Edgy, but without the logout difficulties. FYI, bug is here and applies to Ubuntu generally...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....1/+bug/107115

I bought this laptop before I knew better than to get an ATI card. If you can do without the prop driver, the open source one is functional (doesn't provide TV-out though). As for the rest, Broadcomm wireless was easier to get working because of several bug fixes since Edgy. No bug workarounds needed this time.

Everything else appears to be working well and again it is noticably faster.

---------

Third machine was a older 32 bit AMD desktop with a GeForce4. This machines boots okay without the nvidia driver, and also works well with it. No real issues here and again a speed improvement. Brother MFC printer/scanner worked well with Brother's drivers - same as Edgy. Logitech webcam driver worked out-of-the-box with Feisty. With Edgy, the stock driver was broken and I had to build it from source with every kernel update, so that was an improvement.


My general advice is don't upgrade. Copy your /home folder, then do a fresh install. Then create the same users, install additional software, and copy the /home folder back. Takes a few hours but I believe you end up with less hassles down the road. Also, here's a howto on backing up partitions, which is good to do before atempting an upgrade- makes rolling the system back a snap.
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=13735.0

[Amoeba]

Re: Everybody happy?

Feisty is my first install of the Ubuntu distribution. I installed the beta version. I come from using Gentoo as my desktop and I can vouche for being a happy Kubuntu (Feisty) user. Everything just works.

I know I didn't have trouble because the hardware I buy has linux support.

I would also like to add that I have it installed on both my workstation and my laptop, both with no issues. Both are even running KDE 3.5.7.

[mchuskie]

Re: Everybody happy?

The more I use Feisty the more I wish I'd stayed with Edgy, and I'm sad to say that...

Networking generally is problematic, and I sometimes have to have several manual bites at the cherry before it lets my network card get an IP address. Sometimes it forgets what network interfaces are up and which are down (and which exist...). And that's without the complication of the KDE network settings app, which I've always found to be buggy. I've just spent five minutes trying to get Feisty to bring up my loopback network interface. I could ping everyone in the world but myself!

xrandr is dodgy, and causes all sorts of crashes if you use Xinerama (MythTV, guidance-power-manager, to name but two)

There's a bug in the kernel (OK, not Ubuntu's fault specifically) that stops hibernate and standby working properly on my laptop (I've grabbed the kernel from Gutsy, which seems to work well).

Depressingly, this list seems to be growing longer. The focus for Feisty was, IIRC, "even more of the latest bleeding-edge stuff that's edgier than Edgy" - maybe Gutsy's focus should be "Take all that stuff, and make it work properly"...

[francois]

Re: Everybody happy?

I'll add my own l2 cents' worth.

I have been using Kubuntu in various incarnations since Breezy. About a year ago I installed Dapper on my laptop, which I use for work, some of which is intense client-facing stuff (like delivering strategy presentations to board meetings ...).

I always find a way to mention the fact that my computer runs Linux, and mention the open source model. I can't afford to have a half-baked buggy unreliable computer. Kubuntu so far has been most reliable, largely thanks to this forum and other well-intentioned IT experts willing to provide their advice for free to less knowledgeable people like me. The philosophical significance of this cannot be underestimated.

Yes, I find it frustrating at times. Yes, it does require more time and energy to figure out how things work. But the rewards of having a system that you understand a bit more, that is more predictable and stable, are certainly worth hanging in there for.