Despite a less than stellar experience with the previous version of Ubuntu I decided to climb back on the horse and mosey down for a visit with Ubuntu’s fraternal twin, Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is what Ubuntu would look like if he decided to abandon the patent leather shoes and forsake all corduroy and khahki and opt instead for snakeskin cowboy boots, lamé, metallics and sequins.
No, I’m not a fashion expert. But I can Google.
Kubuntu uses the oft-criticized-but-oh-so-kewl-looking KDE desktop. Should you prefer something tasteful and understated [read: dull] fear not — the Kubuntu and Ubuntu releases are identical save for the desktop environments. Thus, like its twin, Kubuntu offers the same features that have made Ubuntu a household name… at least among technically savvy [read: nerdy] households. They share the same bleeding edge features (inherited from their psychotic cousin, twice removed — Debian Sid) with well chosen packages (office software, media players, printer drivers, etc) so that your main hurdle is just installing the software itself. Once it’s loaded, you’re ready to use it. For this, Kubuntu borrows the Debian pre-release of the Debian installer. While text-based [read: boring], it is simple and efficient, and if you intend to install Kubuntu as your only operating system, you can do so by selecting the installer’s default options (i.e. spend most of your time pressing the ‘Enter’ key).
As I write this, I’ve been using Kubuntu for almost a month. As a die-hard fan of Debian, Kubuntu’s main selling point to me is (not surprisingly) how much it looks, feels, and acts like Debian. The first difference is that the root user account is present but disabled (because it has no password). So, you can choose to perform all your administrative tasks by beginning them with the ‘sudo’ command, or you can enable the account with ‘sudo passwd root’ and enter a password for the root account. As a Debian user. I prefer to open a console, type ‘su’ and perform a number of admin tasks in a row, so, I enabled root.
That being done, the system is almost indistinguishable from my main Deban box, except for… the bugs. Debian Sid (upon which Kubuntu is based) is experimental software. If Kubuntu was sold like commercial software (i.e. in a shrink-wrapped box), it would have to be crammed with so many warning labels that all you could read would be: ‘ bu t ‘.
But, this is the price for bleeding edge software: it’s not exhaustively tested. Even so, Kubuntu is remarkably stable… more or less so depending upon your individual computer. Some users have had problems with Konqueror (KDE’s web browser and file manager) crashing and exiting spontaneously. This doesn’t happen on my system. A more serious problem — where the desktop settings (including login theme, wallpaper, taskbar, system tray and other kicker panel settings) are wiped out after the system software is updated — is universal. You can read about it here and here. The Kubuntu bug report is here.
The users on the forums have offered a number of solutions. I was forced to re-create my desktop settings manually, and have tried to apply several of the fixes. This solution, the last one I tried, seems to have re-stabilized my system and even allowed me to continue to keep updating Kubuntu by APT-GET (the Debian software package manager). The community’s gripe is that (at least as of this writing) the developers have not posted a fix themselves, or corrected the problem in a new release. Kubuntu development is in 6 month intervals, with each release given an 18 month lifespan for updates. Some fear that the problems with this release will remain, and that the fix to the core software will not be corrected until Kubuntu 5.10 in October. I don’t know if this is true, but (as a Debian user) I am accustomed to waiting for hours or days, not weeks, for a fix.
I’m giving this release the same rating I gave the previous one. I like it more… because I like Debian, KDE, and the fact that Canonical Ltd. even dared to branch out from Gnome. However, there is a happy medium between the Debian style of releasing (“We will release nothing until we’re convinced it’s 99.99999% stable…”) and an Ubuntu release (“Ooops! it’s April / October again!”).
Ubuntu has climbed to the top of the charts at DistroWatch because of its progressive thinking. It’s sad to think it can be constrained to a calendar. With a larger developer base for Kubuntu, this might work in the future. Perhaps Kubuntu should have remained in pre-release until 5.10.
No… scratch the “Perhaps” from that last sentence.
Too late now, though. And for the record, I’m keeping mine installed.
For now.
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