And the winner is: Kubuntu

As a long term fan of the SUSE and openSUSE distro, there was for me, and many with me, no longer a reason to support this distro after Novell made their patent deal with Microsoft. Inspired by the interesting articles on Boycott Novell, I decided to jump ship, a couple of months ago and tested a dozen of distro's.

On my previous Dutch Blog, I described the other distro's I've tested in the meantime. However, you probably don't understand Dutch, remember, a picture saids more then 1000 words. The screen shots speak for them selves :-)

Of course these screen shots are thumbnails, to enlarge them to their full size, simply click on them.

However installing any distribution should be no problem, since I am for over 8 years a devoted GNU/Linux user now. But somehow, we GNU/Linux users have became very spoiled. For those who are new to GNU/Linux, manually partitioning the hard disk drive and creating file systems on it, from the command line, however is not an option. Here's where the Live CD comes into view.

What on Earth is a Live CD?

Well, it's name saids it already all. It's a Operating System, that runs "Live" from a CD or DVD-ROM, without the need to install anything on your hard disk drive, so you'll be able to test it without taking any risks (possibly loss of data etc.). If you feel happy with Kubuntu, you are able to install it any time it suits you, simply by clicking the Install icon on the desktop. The so called migration wizard will ask you six questions and that's all. If you are sates fight with your choices, Kubuntu will copy the CD-ROM content to a partition on your hard disk drive.


The great advantage of installing Kubuntu on your hard disk drive, is that you are able to add 1000's of software packages to it. Another advantage of Kubuntu in contrast with Ubuntu is that it uses the KDE desktop environment, which is highly configurable. For example, the desktop you'll see on these screen shots is dramatically personalized. It looks far from the original Kubuntu desktop. A great resource for color schemes, kicker buttons, alternative menu systems (on my Kubuntu install Tasty Menu was used), wallpapers and other artwork can be found on KDE-Look.

Plenty of additional software is available from the repositories. To install additional software, simply start the Adept (System -> Add/Remove Software) package manager and have a look around.


The main reason however, why I choose Kubuntu over Mandriva 2007 and PCLinuxOS 2007 is, that those two did not support the on board sound controller of my IBM PC300PL Pentium III machine (Simonix). Beside that they also refused to play sound while playing Flash movies (Google Video and Youtube) on my Dell Optiplex 240GX Pentium 4 (Pleunix), while it supported the sound controller without any glitch. I tried a few of my little ol' tricks (making symlinks to the Flash Lib).

Eye candy.

What surprised me most, the past years I've been working with GNU/Linux is the way its desktop evolved. Visionaries keep on telling us that "this is the year of the Linux desktop". Well in my home it has been the year of the GNU/Linux desktop since 1998. I tried several desktop environments, but KDE is without any doubt my favorite. Since version 3.2.x KDE has become the ultimate desktop anyway. And beside that, you must have been living under a rock the last year, if you've never heard about the composite desktop, also often referred as to the 3D desktop, with its greatest feature "The (legendary) Cube"

Now what exactly is this mysterious cube?

To explain that we'll have to go back to The Pager. A tiny applet that lives in the kicker of every X11 desktop environment. The pager gives the user the ability to use 4 distinct workspaces, meaning in practice you are able to switch between 4 desktops, simply by selecting the preferred desktop icon. So in fact the user is able to run 4 applications full screen at the same time. Now the cube does exactly the same, but this time in a animated 3D manner, presented as a cube. This funny animated toy, makes you want to use this function much more often and thus has a positive influence on your productivity :-)

So that's what all the fuzz's about?

Certainly not, there's more! For example in the next screen shot (on the left side of this text block) you'll see a translucent file manager (Konqueror), which doesn't only look cutting edge, but could in some cases even be very handy, think about a terminal window. Beside that you might have noticed the cutting edge icon set I installed, all the candy came from KDE-Look. And finally there are the Super Karamba applets, like the analogue clock and system statistics, on the right side of the first screen shot. The great thing is that all of this runs on a 1,7 Ghz CPY, 380 MiB RAM and a old school nVIDEA 64 MiB RAM Geoforce 2 MX400 GPU!

Games, games, games.

Another complaint by those clueless lusers is, that there are no games for GNU/Linux. Ha! Kubuntu comes loaded with games. You'll only have to install them using System -> Add/remove Software. I for one am a serious FPS addict and Kubuntu comes up with a few of them, right out of the box. However, fortunately on Wikipedia I found this impressive Free FPS list. Most of them are available for GNU/Linux!

Conclusion.

However I loved playing around with all those distros, I described in my Dutch blog (which will be discontinued) Kubuntu, the distro I've despised until now is my new mate. I installed it on both Pleunix and Simonix, only Hexon remains running on Debian Etch (with XFCE, due to the lack of RAM (64 MiB) and Proton still runs FreeDOS (even more lack of RAM). Kubuntu is the right choice for those who are used to Windows only, because Ubuntu looks to alien for those n00bs IMHO.

Since I am an old school GNU/Linuxiac, I've had no problems installing and configuring it. If you are a n00b however, there's a fair chance you will find answers on your national Ubuntu forum.

You've got the opportunity to stick to the latest cutting edge technology, on your outdated PC, no need to buy a new one, if you have a machine that matches Pleunix (dated 2002). If you don't want to download the CD, you can order a Free copy from Kubuntu's shipit service; yes that was no typo, it's free as in free beer :-)

The Tux wallpaper is Copyright (C) 2003 by Daniël Bleyenberg.
The icon set is simoo's OS-K.
The color scheme is 5er's 53dark Blue.

Here is a detailed article on Kubuntu by Rick Lehrbaum.

Happy hackin'!