I decided to go ahead and upgrade my desktop and laptop computers to Kubuntu Intrepid on November 4th while all of the elections were in progress. It was not a painful experience, but at the same time I would not want to do it again for a long time.
To start off, I went to the Ubuntu.com upgrade website to find out how to do the upgrade from the cd I already had on hand. One simple terminal command started the process – “kdesudo “sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade”
This was immediately followed by another window showing the progress.
This windows was on screen for nearly twenty-five minutes total. I finally saw the new Linux kernel being installed.
Finally. The restart dialog popped up.
After a restart, I had a new Kubuntu Linux 64-bit desktop. The KDE 4.1.3 desktop was very nice looking. Now I started doing my little customizations here in there for the things I need and use constantly. I added a few icons to the kicker bar and nothing else major.
I was sitting there enjoying the look of the KDE4 desktop and my screen flashed, suddenly. All of my custom settings were gone. I first thought that maybe this was just a one time thing, maybe it would not happen again. I was wrong. The Plasma Desktop crash nearly five times in about fifteen minutes, each time reseting itself and losing my custom settings. This happend on both my desktop and laptop computers, at about the same rate. I was getting more and more frustrated each time the crash happened. I went to my home directory and deleted the .kde and .kde4 folders, just in case there was an old KDE3 configuration file causing a conflict and invoking a crash. Still nothing. It continued to crash more than five times after that.
I had enough. I searched for the KDE3.5 packages and did not find any in the repositories. I logged out into a terminal and issued the command “sudo apt-get autoremove kubuntu-desktop* kde*” to get rid of KDE completely. I had had enough.
After the total KDE removal, I decided to give Gnome a try. I issued the command “sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop amarok k3b.” It took about thirty-minutes per computer to download an d install the ubuntu packages and install them. I used to be a Gnome user, but never really liked it a lot. I have to say the new Gnome desktop is nice.
I may give KDE4 another try when it hits version 4.2. I am not giving up on the KDE desktop, it is just not for me right now.
My affection for the Linux operating system is sometimes tested, and this past weekend was one of those times. I was so looking forward to installing the new Kubuntu 8.10 to my desktop and wasted a day for nothing. Not only was the new KDE 4.1 desktop rather horrible and slow, it could not recognize my monitor resolution properly. My searching around online seemed to indicate that this was a real problem. I switched back to version 8.04 where I never had a problem with my GeForce 7 card. The reason I wanted to change originally was that I loaded the amd64 version of 8.04 and found I had to jump through hoops to get some things to work (like Skype, Flash, Acrobat for Linux) or that there were no 64 bit versions of various programs. Anyway, 8.04.1 Kubuntu works just great. I'll be sticking with it until official support stops.