I wanted to give Kubuntu a try in my laptop after I gave it a try and was dissatisfied and removed it when Kubuntu 9.04 was released. There were lots of bugs and for a laptop, using the widget for wireless connection was a pain. I have written about it in my blog post here. KDE underwent a lot of bug fixes and new features since then, so I thought I would download and give it a try. I downloaded Kubuntu 9.10 yesterday and installed it my laptop.
The installation was fine though I got some errors when the Live CD booted and shutdown. The new installer looked promising, but it needs some fine tuning. My laptop’s default resolution is 1680*1050 and the installer was using a lower resolution. This resulted in installer text/options etc. overlapping in some cases. One example is, when you create a username and password, you’ll see 3 or 4 options at the bottom on how you want to login. The 3rd option which encrypts your home directory wasn’t clear.
Once installed, the boot process was very fast. It’s faster than Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. The old network manager is back and auto starts, so that’s good. Though I could click the network manager icon and select create a network and select the wireless network I want, I think it’s not as user friendly as Ubuntu. It would be nice if it could give you the available networks directly rather than going through a set of clicks.
Plasma got lots of widgets including some for social networking like Twitter, Facebook etc. It has more widgets now than the screen allows. It’s getting much better. The other thing I like in KDE is the ease of installing and changing themes and wallpapers. You can just right click the desktop, select desktop settings and you will see an option there to get new themes and wallpapers.
Konqueror is getting better, but I don’t feel comfortable with it as much as Firefox. Kubuntu prompted me to install additional plugins for Konqueror to play video and other stuff, which is good. I thought I would give Arora a try since it was the default browser in the alpha stages of Kubuntu 9.10 before they went back to Konqueror. Arora starts pretty fast, but I’m not sure if it loads pages faster than Firefox or not. It also lacks the amount of extensions that Firefox offers including security related ones. For Firefox fans, there is an option in the internet menu that will install Firefox if you need.
I used it only for 10 minutes and it impressed me. I would like to use it little more and see if I’m comfortable continuing it. I believe KDE team and Kubuntu team are making a good progress compared to the amount of support they get.
Hey Arun
I just installed Kubuntu 9.10 but I am unable to connect to wired network
Any suggestions ?
Not sure why. I never had issues with wired network and unfortunately, I don’t use Kubuntu now.
Lol… Chill Ladies
Pretty honest blog, but what the f***? How is connecting to a wireless network in Kubuntu hard? Here are the steps that even a 4-year-old can understand:
1) Click on the little network icon in the tray (bottom right, it looks kind of like a microphone, sort of).
2) Click on “Connect to other network”
3) Select your network and enter in additional encryption settings if needed.
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Cyktic,
It’s easy for you and me, but not for my parents or other non tech people compared to how easy it is to select in Ubuntu. What I want is, clicking on the icon should show the networks available rather than clicking another option to connect to other network. Connect to other network doesn’t make sense when I haven’t connected to any network.
On further inspection, all you need to do is click on the network icon, select network, enter password and TADA!!
A dumbass could do that. Since you can’t do that… well… That speaks volumes.
Cyktic, I could easily do that. I was talking about non technical users. It took dumbass like you to do further inspection to find that out, so obviously, it needs improvement for usability.