Why I quit using Kubuntu and where I found my refuge

I has recently spoken of my experiences with kubuntu 9.04

Today I removed it from my system, due to several reasons, most on the functionality side.

1. KDE4 would not remember the settings. My desktop widgets would get reset on every boot. (this alone is a deal breaker)
2. Sound wouldn’t work fine. multiple sources of sound/flash problem (I needed it! youtube and media player)
3. Microphone wouldn’t work out-of-the-box (need Skype)
   
4. Hard disk drives would not auto mount. had to be mounted by typing the password each time.
5. The themes weren’t really appealing. The plasma desktop, however was.
6. General appeal. To quote Srik, “I always have this weird feeling that everything in Ubuntu is oversized.” I share the feeling.

Anyway, I truly couldn’t make myself try anything that did not have wubi to set it up. (separate partitions just aren’t necessary) Ubuntu, Kubuntu – tried both this month. The next release is in August, I think.
So here was my saviour… (drumroll…) LinuxMint

1. Cool looks (yeah, its important to me)
2. Things work out of the box (yea, Sabayon style on debian platform )
3. They have a good story behind it. I liked the story (the {clem} paragraph in the About page)
4. Everything I expect to work works (yea- graphics, flash, wireless, apt-get, drivers, codecs – you name it!)
5. Zero post-install customization necessary (installing apps, drivers, fixing things.. )

I have further more respect for Ubuntu now, seeing that things like Linux Mint can be built on it.
Linux Mint 7 will surely stand high in the rankings of my experiences with linux distributions, and will be my current recommended distro for new users.

QOTD and SOTD

QOTD (quote of the day)

It is hardly as if women leaders do not wield real power in India. 255 Lok Sabha seats have been won in the 2009 elections by parties where women are the absolute and unchallenged leaders. In spite of this, we have seen no change in the number of women Parliamentarians. The idea of reserving seats for a group is based on the pectation that when they come to power, they will use it to help other less fortunate members of the group. Clearly that expectation has been definitively belied.

- Santosh Desai writes in “Gender Reservations” under City City Bang Bang, Times of India, Bangalore, Page 8, June 15th 2009.

SOTD (software of the day )

VideoCacheView for windows
After watching a video in a Web site, you may want to save the video file into your local disk for playing it offline in the future. If the video file is stored in your browser’s cache, this utility can help you to extract the video file from the cache and save it for watching it in the future.
It automatically scans the entire cache of Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based Web browsers (Including Firefox) and finds all video files that are currently stored in it. It allows you to easily copy the cached video files into another folder for playing/watching them in the future.

Powered by ScribeFire.

kubuntu 9.04 – my experiences

Today, I installed Kubuntu 9.04

• The Good

1. installs from within windows on ntfs (i’ve stopped attempting to install suse and sabayon for this reason)
2. detects wireless (no wireless problems in linux since two years now)
3. isn’t crashing (not that i have used it much or pushed it, for that matter)
4. looks beautiful (this is one important factor that is keeping me tied to this)
5. KDE4 widgets are kick-ass. cool!!
6. its closing on with Ubuntu wrt functionality (i fundamentally like KDE, was a GNOME user due to Ubuntu’s remarkable features)
7. installing software is easy. (installed opera as binary, codecs and related stuff with kubuntu-restricted-extras apt meta-package, including flash and java)
8. Bundles software for most requirements are very good. Definitely a plus over gnome apps, I personally feel.

• The Bad

1. Graphics issue. Drivers. Compiz doesn’t work. major blow. (I don’t care if it isn’t their issue. I am not blaming anyone. Just that, it doesn’t work for me)
2. Restricted Hardware Driver isn’t mentioning that graphics card has propreitory driver. (I read that there isn’t one yet, for Jaunty+ATI)
3. Sound from two sources – still buggy (youtbe in opera didn’t give sound with amarok paused)
4. window manager themes could be better. (The destop looks beautiful, the windows not anywhere so)
5. mouseless operation not comfortable (maybe its just me, being new to this desktop environment. buttons are tiny, mouse usage reqd is heavy)
6. Keyboard media keys didn’t work out-of-the-box. configured them for amarok alone, but yet they don’t act as global shortcuts now.

Its otherwise a very good software. Remarkable in the fact that it is all this, and yet free. who are these ppl who write this software?? where are they? @ http://twitter.com/arbitya/status/2080048754

screenshot – http://dailyscreenshot.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/kde-4-and-desktop-widgets/