[lug] Initial impressions of Kubuntu

[Daniel Webb]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:27:45PM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 11:46:28PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
> >This is the 6.06 LTS release, which I assume means it has gone through
> 
> Well, first of all, you should probably try the latest Kubuntu -- 6.10, and
> see if that works better for you.
 
But that new one doesn't have the 3-year security updates right?  That's the
selling point for me to try Ubuntu.

> I *HAVE* successfully installed Kubuntu several times, and regular Ubuntu
> server several times...  Just for another data-point.

My second impression of Ubuntu is better.  Now that I got a good CD, it boots
fine and the installer is slick and well thought-out.  They obviously put all
their energy into the installer and not much QA into the boot menu.  I'll fix
that if I decide to move to Ubuntu for all my desktops.  Assuming it works as
well as I've seen on the fora, I'll probably switch.  I've had a hell of a
time trying to get USB, pcmcia, and sound all working with 2.6 kernels on my
Thinkpad 600Es in the past.  Supposedly people are using Ubuntu on 600Es with
all those things, and that would be really nice.  If I can get all that
working, I'll be very happy to leave it all alone for the next 2 years.

The installer does screw up the time, switching it to GMT *after* you set it
to the local time in the installer.  Is there *any* Linux installer that
doesn't somehow screw up the time?  I haven't seen one yet.

Also, they seem to use a "special" version of cp for transferring the files
from CD to HD.  It's been 2 hours and it's moved from 13% to 14%.  Knoppix
does the transfer on that machine in 20 minutes.

I was surprised how snappy KDE and Konqueror were on that old laptop with the
live cd.  It's the fastest I've seen yet, very impressive for a 366Mhz machine
with 288M ram.  I assume this is mainly due to improvements in Qt but don't
really know.