Based upon what I’ve read about Kubuntu and KDE 4.x I have stayed away. In fact, I’ve stayed away from Ubuntu all together. 8.04, 8.04.1, 8.04.2 and 8.10 dissapointed me and they didn’t live up to the “promises made to me” by the 7.04 and 7.10 releases.
Therefore I was reluctant to revisit Ubuntu, and the beta in particular. No wonder I was surprised. Still only a beta, the experience was far better than the 8.x.x series. No hazzle whatsoever.
It works – no hazzle.
I installed the no-mono-packages, and got virualbox directly from Sun.
No hazzle whatsoever. Hardware (Thinkpad T61/Nvida NVS 140) worked. All buttons, hibernation, suspend, HDAPS (HDD shockprotection) and TP_smapi (Battery charge control ) worked. Kernel, Xorg and driver obviously deserves the kudos.
In several distro I’ve had problems with my smartcard reader thus had to download and compile, not with 9.04.
As I prefer to perform fresh installs and run dualboot, a beta is a kind of a fiest where I can fiddle around abit, sort out whats ok and what’s not, I could not resist installing KDE 4.2.2. And it’s great!
Girly stuff.
In fact it worked well enough for me to send the Kubuntu Beta download link to a friend of mine – a woman (she prefers girl), nearly 50. She never installed a OS before – she just needed a LiveCD to confirm that her old HP/XP laptop was bricked. Never talked about installing it!
But she did! No assistance whatsoever! Now she wants Kubuntu on her production machine as well! She might have lost a bit of faith due to the persistent Broadcom &@#¤, but that I’ll sort out for her.
Now, I’ve got the final product and chose Kubuntu. It works just as fine as (and in some areas better than) OpenSuse 11.1, Arch 2.6.29 and Mandriva. It needs 17 sec to boot according to bootchart, and I havent tuned anything. Not even removed any autostarters. No problems with Ext4, but I still keep my docs and mediafiles on Ext3 partitions.
So, where’s the catch?
I prefer a clean, single DE. That means no synaptic. I manage well with the KDE alternative, but it needs further develoment. Features missing. Not a disaster though. And not a showstopper.
Trouble is, I now have 2 primary production distros. Arch and Kubuntu.
