impressed by Kubuntu

[DeJaMo]

I guess everyones expierence varies, so here's mine, for what it's worth.

I've had a debian install for about a year and a half now which runs fine on an old box put together from spare parts.
I tried ubuntu about a year ago on a very old laptop and just didn't take to it.

About a month ago I installed Kubuntu on the same old laptop (400Mhz cpu and 128 MB RAM) and it ran perfectly, but very slow. However I liked the look and feel of it, so I installed it on my Toshiba Satelilite laptop which is about 3 years old with a 1.5Ghz Celeron and 256 MB RAM. It's set up as a dual boot with XP home, as my Good Lady also uses that machine and plays some windows games on it

Everything worked perfectly straight away. In my opinion it's an excellent OS. I'm enjoying using it and learning about it.

[sky]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

Nice to see some posts like this, I think It can help developers to go on with what they're doing
BTW, I also like it a lot, really working like a charm...

[mtman244]

Kubuntu 9.10 - I Love It

My experience with Karmic Koala has been a good one. I recently built a new desktop box (Biostar mobo, AMD 64bit AM2+ Black Edition chip, SATA hdd and SATA CD-DVD player/writers. Prior to this I had used a 32 bit system with IDE drives and ran Kubuntu 8.04 with great success.

Which brings me to my main point. I could not get 8.04 (either 32bit or 64bit versions) to work on the new hardware. If I did not insert "pci=nomsi" into the boot commands, it would not recognize the SATA drives and would not install. When I put that into the boot commands it would boot but would not connect to the internet. After spending many days trying to get it to work, I decided to try Karmic Koala release candidate (this was prior to the final release date for 9.10) and I was quite pleased that there was no problems with the install.

After the 29th release date, I downloaded the 64bit version of Karmic and loaded it using a clean install. I have been able to move things where I want them and set up Karmic nearly as I like (there are a few things I still think are missing but expect that, with time, will be added).

I am blown away with the speed of Ext4 and with the speed of the boot up. In fact, the speed with which the whole system exhibits is wonderful. A few things did not work but were easily fixed. Kubuntu is definitely on the right track and will get better and better as time goes on.

A couple of suggestions for the future: 1. Get back to individual control of individual desktop wallpapers as in KDE 3.5 versions. I like this as I can follow a theme on each desktop and know by the wall paper which desktop I have open. 2. Possible port Adept package manager to future versions of Kubuntu. I don't like Synaptic and I found KpackageKit to be cumbersome in that finding missing software and installing it requires many more clicks or operations than Adept. I also find the individual windows for each package resizing (jumping from the name size to a new name size) to be distracting.

The above are just suggestions and I am not complaining because 9.10 is the best distribution out there right now. A big thanks to everyone who worked on it and a pat on your backs.

[MoonRise]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

It is nice to see the positive every once and a while. I do agree that Karmic is excellent. Very smooth.

[Qqmike]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

Hi, mtman244. Interesting about your experience with 8.04(.3). Best OS I've ever used. Just now getting into setting up 9.10 for real. But I've put 8.04.3 on an older machine (2005 -- D915GAVL) and on a newer one (2009 -- DG33FBC), and it runs flawlessly and snappy on both. Glad you found your sweet spot with 9.10, good to hear your report. -> 9.10 is looking very nice, indeed.

[GreyGeek]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

Nice post! 8)

This forum attracts primarily folks who have problems of one sort or another, so while posts of high praise are not common, yours does point out the fact that many more have problem free experiences than those with problems, but don't see a need or have a reason to come here and "high-5" the developers. So, some folks get the idea that because most of what they see here are posts about problems then "everyone" must be having problems so Kubuntu isn't "useful".

[askrieger]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

@mtman:

1. Get back to individual control of individual desktop wallpapers as in KDE 3.5 versions. I like this as I can follow a theme on each desktop and know by the wall paper which desktop I have open

Please check out this blog post. You FINALLY CAN have separate desktops with different wallpapers (just like the REAL KDE) and different widgets (even better). I do that for precisely the same reason that you do.

It took a while for me to get this stuff working on my hardware, and, unfortunately, I tried a number of things and didn't write all of them down, so I can't tell you exactly how to make it work. I suspect that the main part was probably a fortuitous upgrade in some library I've never heard of.

[MoonRise]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

Any way to write a How To? That sounds interesting having different wallpaper on a multi DT system.


EDIT: Never mind...The Blog was fairly straight forward. That's pretty cool!

[askrieger]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

All I can say for sure is that I've missed the ability to have different wallpapers on different desktops for different purposes since KDE4 came out. It's great for people (like me) with mild (I think) cognitive difficulties. I read the above referenced blog post after upgrading to Karmic. The first time or two that I tried to implement the author's advice, it didn't work, but then, a couple of days ago, it did.

So there are two possibilities: I should have been able to do it right from the moment I upgraded to Karmic, but I messed it up; or there was some upgrade of something, a couple of days ago, that suddenly made it possible once again to set up a work environment like KDE3. My actual technique was to set up eight desktops, then (for each desktop) to right-click on the desktop, then left click desktop settings and do the the usual stuff with a background photo (as an ex-astrophysicist, I use downloads from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day site). I then noticed that only one desktop had my plasma widgets (or is it plasmoids). So I tried to add them, but, as usual, I added the wrong weather plasmoid and there it was, on that desktop only. I went wild from there.

[chipbennett]

Re: impressed by Kubuntu

All I can say for sure is that I've missed the ability to have different wallpapers on different desktops for different purposes since KDE4 came out. It's great for people (like me) with mild (I think) cognitive difficulties. I read the above referenced blog post after upgrading to Karmic. The first time or two that I tried to implement the author's advice, it didn't work, but then, a couple of days ago, it did.

So there are two possibilities: I should have been able to do it right from the moment I upgraded to Karmic, but I messed it up; or there was some upgrade of something, a couple of days ago, that suddenly made it possible once again to set up a work environment like KDE3. My actual technique was to set up eight desktops, then (for each desktop) to right-click on the desktop, then left click desktop settings and do the the usual stuff with a background photo (as an ex-astrophysicist, I use downloads from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day site). I then noticed that only one desktop had my plasma widgets (or is it plasmoids). So I tried to add them, but, as usual, I added the wrong weather plasmoid and there it was, on that desktop only. I went wild from there.

So the different-activities-per-desktop functionality is working a bit more robustly now? I tried it a week or two ago (right after Karmic release), and it worked but was really buggy. I'll have to give it another go!