Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there’s a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.

While I find myself using Solaris and NetBSD more often these days, I do like to keep up with what is happening in the Linux world. So today I decided to download and install the newly-released Kubuntu 7.04. After installing it and using it for a little while, I am very impressed. Dare I say it, I think Kubuntu puts up quite a challenge for Windows Vista to face.

Installation
The installation is, of course, the first part of Kubuntu that many users will experience. Being quite used to the text-based installer of a system like NetBSD, I do not think that I’m a good judge of how easy or difficult a typical individual would find it to install Kubuntu. But I will say that for my installation attempt, it went flawlessly. Each step to be performed was explained in a clear and concise manner. The progression was sensible, and in the end I got a system that was working. I have no complaints here.

KDE
Although KDE 3.5.6 isn’t a new release by any means (it was released at the end of January 2007), it’s a very enjoyable desktop environment to use, and the Kubuntu developers do a really good job of integrating it with the rest of the GNU/Linux system. My one main complaint has to do with the default theme. Namely, I dislike the use of the 3D gradient sort of effect used in the window title bars. The grey area, which intersects the lower half of the window title, is distracting and pointless. Of course, the theme can be quite easily changed, so this is not a major problem by any means.

Usability
I have found the usability of Kubuntu 6.10 to be excellent. As always, KDE provides a very clean, integrated and effective desktop environment. All of the major types of applications are present for starters. Konqueror provides a fast, memory-efficient and standards-compliant web browser. Although I prefer mutt, KMail is truly a very powerful email client. Kopete is a complete instant messenging solution. Of course, there are many, many other useful KDE applications to choose from. And beyond that, there are the thousands of other open source applications that are so easily installed.

Kubuntu does a great job at showing off the maturity of today’s open source software. More importantly, I think it shows how the commercial offerings from various other companies are facing some very stiff competition from their open source counterparts. In terms of usability, Kubuntu is more than ready for the corporate desktop. As mentioned earlier, it provides essentially all of the basic applications needed to run a business, all without the cost and licensing hassle of many of the commercial offerings. And I do not doubt for a moment that many home users would find it to be a practical, high-quality system, as well. In many cases, I think Kubuntu would render Windows Vista sufficiently useless, or at least not worth the cost of using it.

Performance
Although I have not performed any benchmarking, I do get the impression that this release of Kubuntu is more efficient and responsive than the last release of Kubuntu that I tried on this test computer, Kubuntu 6.10. Applications seem quicker to start up, and even when using them they feel much more responsive. Switching between tabs in the Konqueror web browser, which was noticeably slow under the installation of Kubuntu 6.10, happens almost instantaneously now. The application menu on the taskbar also seems a whole lot more responsive, with the list of applications being displayed virtually instantaneously. I don’t know if this possible performance improvement is due to the use of GCC 4.1.2, Glibc 2.5, or the Linux kernel 2.6.20. Regardless, I am always pleased to find software getting faster as time goes on, rather than getting more bloated and inefficient as is often the case with many of the commercial desktop OS offerings.

Conclusions
Kubuntu 7.04 is the real deal. The installation was easy and successful. In terms of usability, everything is there: KDE offers all of the necessary applications, and Kubuntu offers the integration. The performance is suitable. And unlike Windows Vista, Kubuntu 7.04 is a pleasure to use. So I’d suggest that you try it out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 4:32 am and is filed under GNOME, KDE, Konqueror, Linux, NetBSD, Open Source, Software, Solaris, UNIX, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.