by Marius Gheorghe
4. February 2009 15:25
Once in a while, i have the habit of checking out the "hottest" Linux distro , so the past weekend i've installed Ubuntu 8.10. So here are a few opinions (both positive and negative):
- the install process was quick and painless. In ~20 min i went from staring at a XP desktop to staring at GNOME.
- the default Gnome based desktop (and the Human theme) is pretty cool .
- for a guy coming from the Windows world the mouse cursor movement is just plain wrong. I can't really explain it but no matter how much i try to tweak it the cursor movement seems slow/sluggish.
- most of the fonts looked butt ugly even with ClearType enabled.
- it's impressive how fast and easy is to install programs: sudo apt-get install <package> and you're set.
- although i like Gnome, if you're starting to do comparations, you're going to find a gazillion little thinks which hurt usability : for instance it's just plain wrong to add a "About" menu entry in the Gnome panels contextual menu. I'm not gonna even start about the Gnome file browser....
- i don't really like the 4.x release of KDE (tried both 4.1 and the newly released 4.2). It tries to hard to be spiffy and cool but instead (al least for now..) ends up being slow and a little awkward.
But despite the negative things, the most important thing to remember about Ubuntu is that in ~20 min you can have a free, full featured OS with a boatload of great applications.
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