Eversince installing Ubuntu about three years ago, XP rots on unused partitions of my computers. Ubuntu has been a pleasure to use and except for occasional gaming, XP has become obsolete – both at the office and at home.
While previous Ubuntu releases have been one solid update after the other, the most recent “stable” release “Intrepid Ibex” has been a bit of a letdown.
They were unlucky with their timing. OpenOffice 3 isn’t included because it was released after Ubuntu’s feature freeze, and some more recent drivers seem to be out-of-date for the same reason:
The WLAN drivers for my shiny new (linux-friendly) Acer Aspire One Netbook don’t work, its graphics driver brings up garbage on the screen when using 3d desktop effects and I was also bitten by the inability to use an external monitor at native resolution – this worked out-of-the-box on the same machine with the previous release.
Ubuntu’s default email client Evolution still sucks with multiple IMAP accounts – no improvement after three years – so still the first thing to do is replace it with Thunderbird. Gnome VFS seems to have become slower with SFTP and its bookmarks don’t appear in the file dialog anymore, which they used to do in the previous release.
This time, I tried Xubuntu und Kubuntu on my Netbook to see how they deal with limited screen estate, but KDE still looks very much like work in progress and XFCE wasn’t really that much better than Gnome as a user interface.
To sum it up: Not much of an improvement, this time. Hoping for the next release.
8.10 is also a lot of fun in VMware – it messes up the mouse speed on the host Mac OS X. So I am back to 8.04 again.
Also I had my part of the fun with Ubuntu on the eee PC:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-eee/+bug/244057 Hibernate does not work if running Ubuntu from a SD card
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-eee/+bug/244059 Cannot change sound volume – quite a lot of fun to have the startup sound of Ubuntu at max volume while listening to a talk at a conference
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-eee/+bug/238780 GRUB installed incorrectly if installing to a SD card
I believe Ubuntu is a great piece of software. It helped me a lot and I am very thankful. But at least on the eee PC it is just no option. The eee PC is sold and to be honest I am thinking about getting another one – this time with XP
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Try KDE 4.2 sources. But Kubuntu isn’t a good KDE Distribution. I am using KDE 4.2 on Debian and it works like a charm. Kubuntu never were a good kde distribution, even at kde 3.5.x times. But Ubuntu is one of the best gnome distributions and even xubuntu is quite usable.