Kubuntu Gutsy

I finally reached my threshold a couple days ago of the number of times I can read John Resig's recommendation of Firefox 3.0 without trying it. (Every jQuery developer has one, I expect.) Unfortunately, my attempts to upgrade MEPIS 6.0 onto the dependencies for Firefox 3.0 (GTK, primarily) involved half of the core libraries, so I decided it was time for a change. Unfortunately, MEPIS 7.0 wasn't cutting it--it felt shoddy, and within a few hours of playing with it, Firefox's tabbed browsing no longer worked. My distinct impression was that the transition from Ubuntu repositories back to straight Debian had left a lot of rough edges and that Warren wasn't putting much time into it anymore.

I'd heard that Kubuntu was the ugly stepchild of the Canonical family and particularly that its hardware support wasn't up to MEPIS's level. With a stock desktop, though, I figured it was safe and tossed it onto a CD.

I've been enormously impressed; the Ubuntu repositories are amazing. Installing Firefox 3.0 and Pidgin was a piece of cake, as was installing the nvidia-glx drivers for full resolution. It was a bit tricky getting Compiz working (I had to switch my dual-screen engine from Xinerama to Twinview), but the performance is worlds beyond what I had before. I'll keep posting my experiences, but I think this is going to be a pleasure to use.