I’ve been harping on Kubuntu the past few months, mainly because, IMHO, they
finally delivered a usable version of KDE. To give equal time, this month I
have the latest alpha/beta of Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic, and I’ll talk about the
ways the latest Gnome desktop is better and worse than KDE.

(Even though there are still two and a half months until release, the alpha
releases are surprisingly stable, and have been for a couple of months now.
This is, I suppose, because Ubuntu doesn’t really start from scratch. On the
day after Jaunty was released, the Canonical development team grabbed the
latest Debian state-of-the-art, aka their “Lenny” distribution, imported it as
the base of Karmic, and began polishing and modifying. Since everything
already worked, in theory, it was easier to see where a glitch came from, and
back out or modify their offending tweak right away. There are about fifty
modifications per day during this phase of the development cycle — definitely
not for those who are bandwidth-impaired.)

By the way, I hope you ladies and gentlemen appreciate how I play musical
chairs with my partitions to install this stuff. At the moment, I have Kubuntu
8.04 (Hardy), Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), and Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.10a3
(Karmic) installed and bootable somewhere or other. My one and only 8.10
(Intrepid) has gone to the great bit bucket in the sky.

See you Tuesday.

BTW, can you believe that when we were children we actually sang, “Rain,
rain, go away!”

–
John Dierdorf

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Events, Linux-Beginner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.