Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”

I couldn’t resist installing Kubuntu 7.10 on my PC.

Here are the things I noticed:

1) It is faster than Kubuntu 7.04 was.
2) Compiz needs to be installed via “apt-get install compiz”, also after selecting nvidia restricted drivers when asked to. There’s no “Enable Desktop Effects” thingie.
3) There’s no such thing as a Compiz Configurator too, you need to install it.
4) The Compiz Configurator misses its icons.
5) Compiz starts by default after it’s been installed. Ye be warned!
6) Sometimes Compiz doesn’t behave very well: today window borders didn’t react to clicks, and it was impossible to shut down, minimize or move windows.
7) The default file manager, Dolphin, is way better than Konqueror to do his job.
8) Konqueror is a great browser, installing and enabling Flash player was easy as stealing a candy from a baby. No need to install Firefox.
9) Kopete doesn’t work with MSN protocol: after putting in the MSN ID and password, it simply crashes when trying to connect.
10) Mt NTFS internal drive didn’t work out of the box. I had to “apt-get install ntfs-config” to solve problems.
11) The command used in the menu to launch ntfs-config was “gksu ntfs-config”. I replaced that with “kdesu ntfs-config”.

Conclusions:

1) Ubuntu team gives way too much importance to Gnome. It is a severe strategic error, KDE4 will show it.
2) Trying to substitute the command-line approach with graphical interfaces doesn’t mean that things are working. It only means that you don’t know what to do if there’s an error.
2) Kubuntu isn’t stable yet. Call it with another name, but definitely not “stable”.

Suggestions:

Use another KDE-based distro if you love KDE and aren’t at all familiar with the shell.

Big Edit:

Wolfenstein ET won’t run under Kubuntu 7.10. Bye bye Gutsy, see you next month!