My take is simpler: picking on the negatives.
1. Social Broadcasting is a screwup, but aimed towards more general public. Gwibber failed to fetch my twitter timeline, worked fine for facebook. So that's a real turn-off. Gwibber hogs my processor when started and its too heavy. 2. Empathy is trying to catch up, but doesn't even come close to what pidgin has to offer in terms of the addictive features. Pidgin does show up in the messaging menu but when minimized it doesn't minimize into it. 3. Ubuntu One has ran into some troubles and they are working on it i think but still is a disappointment. Dropbox works much better. 4. The me menu is a little too much of a space hogger in the panel. Over all the panel gets really crowded when many things are running for a 1280 pixel screen. 5. A big improvement in the software center from karmic koala but some tweaking still remains in design and spacing, many places you run into blank spaces like when you install something the progress bar comes way below.
Over all its been the usual, spend some hours tweaking it upto what you need and it works fine.
On 2 May 2010 17:34, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
As the latest distros get released, users of older computers have to think twice before installing them since the latest ones are heavier and can slow down the computer. For that reason I had removed Kubuntu 9.04 from my system and reverted back to Debian 5 (Lenny). My system is a P4 2.4 GHZ on an Intel 845 board with 512 MB RAM. KDE4's successors are getting more and more heavy and make them practically unusable on older P4 systems.
Then came Ubuntu 10.04 and I had to install its 64 bit version on another machine. Just to see how it looked and felt, I tried the 32 bit CD cd on my own system and was pretty impressed by its sleek look and speed, even in the live CD mode. The menu was fast to access and programs opened reasonably fast. 10.4 has all the latest versions of Firefox, OpenOffice etc. This distro was definitely designed for agility. Since I am a KDE user and to be fair to KDE4.x, the Kubuntu 10.04 Cd was downloaded and tried out live but it was very disappointing. It was slower than Gnome and the looks were very dull. The splash screen during loading had a very poor colour resolution and it looked ugly for a latest distro. The desktop too has some sky blue - gray colour combination that looks lousy. KDE4.x was its usual slow. It looked as if Kubuntu 10.04 was released just as a formality to keep up with Ubuntu 10.04. If the KDE guys are not careful, KDE will become an endangered species. They need to trim and speed it up.
Ubuntu 10.04 has finally replaced Debian 5 KDE on my system and I am quite happy about it. The software package manager 'Ubuntu Software Center' is nice for those who want a gui based one. It can be deceptive and do not rely completely on the package grouping/indexing. There are many packages out of this group too and will be available if you type their name in the search query window. A queer thing I noticed was that the package 'build-essential' was not available in the default India repo. After switching to a Taiwanese repo, I got this package. Everything else went smoothly. I installed the latest HPLIP package and got my HP K-209a printing and scanning working properly. Those who want restricted packages for multimedia support and fonts can install 'ubuntu-restricted-extras'. Thunderbird 3 was downloaded and Evolution was removed. Thunderbird 3 has some features of Windows Live Mail and Firefox. It has tabbed windows like Firefox and variable folder view like Windows Live Mail. This mail is being sent from Thunderbird 3.
The 64 bit version was installed too on another system yesterday. Everything went fine there too. Just keep in mind that Skype's 64 bit version 2.x still does not have camera support in it.
Overall Ubuntu 10.04 is a good system and very handy for those who do not have the latest hardware but want the latest software in their systems. Go ahead, enjoy it.
-- Regards,
Rony.
GNU/Linux ! No Viruses No Spyware Only Freedom.