Kubuntu

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Josh ChaitinPollak wrote:
> Because of all the remarks about Ubuntu, I decided to check it out. I'm 
> not a big fan of Gnome, but I was happy to see the Kubuntu project. Does 
> anyone have experience with this distro? http://www.kubuntu.org/

I've used it, and it works quite well. It's really just an 
variant/add-on for Ubuntu; the base is the same, but you have 
kubuntu-desktop (with KDE) installed instead of ubuntu-desktop (with 
Gnome). You can also take an Ubuntu system and add the kubuntu-desktop 
package, giving you a system that lets you choose either KDE or Gnome 
sessions. Or you can start with Kubuntu and add ubuntu-desktop to that.

The KDE setup is fairly vanilla, with a blue background; Kubuntu hasn't 
gotten as much design work as Ubuntu yet. What can I say; I LIKE the 
Ubuntu brown screens -- but overall, I prefer KDE over Gnome. On the 
Kubuntu menus, all the apps you have installed, KDE or Gnome, get nice 
icons; on the other hand, on the Ubuntu menus, KDE apps get generic 
icons, not application-specific ones.

The one problem I had with Kubuntu (5.04 - Hoary Hedgehog) is that the 
Kynaptic Package Manager would hang. (It's a KDE port of the Synaptic 
Package Manager used on Ubuntu.) It may be fixed in Breezy Badger 
(5.10), but if you use Hoary, I recommend either using apt-get to manage 
your system, or installing the Gnome version of the package manager.

There are no Kubuntu CDs available for free shipping. You can get ISO 
images from kubuntu.org and its mirrors, however.