April 29^th,2007

I was a Slackware linux user since 1994 or so. The first time I installed Slackware it came on 40 floppy disks and it took about four to five hours to install on my Intel 486SX powered PC, equipped with a Cyrus Logic graphic card, 8 mega bytes of ram and 40 mega bytes of disk. This was ages ago. There was no Gnome or KDE back then. Everybody was using FVWM and using Linux as a desktop machine was a dream that was very far away. There was no such thing as Open Office, CUPS or Evolution. But there was Netscape and there was asWedit and eventually The Gimp came along, so linux made a pretty good web site development environment. Anyways, all this to say that Slackware kept me a happy Linux user for more then 12 years. And it's definitely the most stable and well looked after distribution out there. I used Slackware at work and at home and it has never crossed my mind to switch to another distro.

Then, at the end of last year, my friend Fabien started to bug me about this new distro called Ubuntu. I dismissed Ubuntu immediately because it was Gnome based, and I am on the KDE side of the Linux Desktop. "C'est pas grave!", said Fabien ", they also have a KDE based distro. They call it Kubuntu, have a look". I thought, hey, let's see what this is all about... It can't be as good as good old Slack anyways... So I got home, downloaded Kubuntu, burned that DVD, placed it in my work laptop's tray, rebooted and...

My Laptop is a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo Dell M65 equipped with 2 gigs of memory. The Kubuntu live DVD took two or three minutes to boot but at the end of the process, miracle! It had correctly detected all the hardware on my laptop, including the nvidia card and the 1920x1200 display. And the good news kept flowing:

• I connected my usb key and it automatically recognized it and it appeared on the desktop.
• Wired and WIFI networking worked out of the box
• The laptop's sound card and volume control buttons worked out of the box
• Bluetooth seems to work - although I didn't try to connect it to any device
• Excellent Open Office integration
• After minimal configuration, I was able to browse, exchange files and print on the Windows network at work

After booting the live DVD, the install process was very smooth, all I had to do was to tell Kubuntu on which partition to install itself and where to mount the existing ones. It took less then 20 minutes to install Kubuntu on my laptop, with all hardware drivers correctly configured.

For the sake of comparison, after installing Windows XP on the same laptop, I had to spend another four to five hours to locate, install and configure all the device drivers DELL ships on CD. With Slacware, it would have taken me three to five days of configuration work to reach the same level of functionality Kubuntu offers out of the box. At the same time I tried a few other distros, just to see how they work out. I booted knoppix but it couldn't even correctly detect my laptop's display resolution. I also installed Fedora Core. The installation process was smooth but when I tried to boot from the hard drive for the very first time the kernel panicked and everything block. I had to remove the power supply and remove the battery to get it working again. Needless to say I quickly discarded both of them.

If to all this you add the fact that Kubuntu comes with an automated and searchable software package management system with hundreds of prepared applications, which notifies you when new versions of installed packages are available and that installing new software or upgrading existing ones is easy as clicking a button, then you come pretty close to the ideal desktop OS. And it's definitely the best Linux Desktop out there. IMHO.

At the end of the day, I was seduced. I kept Kubuntu and I'm happy user for almost five month now. Mkm called me a fool, Fabien felt very good about himself and Cata gave me a "finally" full of satisfaction. After reading all this you might conclude Kubuntu is perfect. Well, at least version 6.10 it's not, but it comes very close. Meanwhile, 7.04 is out and the live DVD is already burned and waiting to be booted. I'll post my impressions as soon as I get the opportunity to install it.