First Impressions of Kubuntu 8.10

[Derek Broughton]

I'm impressed more by the eye-candy than I expected to be.

That said, I've got lots of beefs, and while I'll work my way through them, this is no way to treat your average user.

1) I use on-board Intel graphics (was the i810 driver, is now intel).  When the X server failed to start with the upgrade-process-modified xorg.conf, it should have just automatically tried the "generic" config, rather than presenting the user with multiple, confusing, and largely meaningless options.

2) I can find no way to tell it which of my two monitors is the primary - nor to tell it that the external monitor is "to the right of" rather than a clone.  Which results in the primary monitor always being the external.  This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't still apparently impossible to have two panels, with integrated taskbar and system tray, one on each monitor - and the primary (ie, the external) keeps stealing my panel.

3) Panels: I can't move the panel to the top of the screen where it belongs, and if I add another (which _does_ go to the top of the screen, I can't put anything visible in it - I added a System tray, I know, because when I right-clicked on the panel it first asked if I wanted to remove the tray, but you couldn't see it)

4) Konqueror, of course: 
 a) I could probably live with Dolphin, if only it had a Tree view!
 b) where on earth is the "back" button?  What use is a browser without a back button?

5) Kontact: <sob>  Nothing seems changed at all, let alone for the better.  The developers still refuse to apply the patch that permits cross-posting without jumping through hoops  (cross-posting to newsgroups is NOT evil!); it still crashes too easily (this is my second attempt at this post). splitter pane positions are still forgotten (in both knode and akregator, at least).

6) Pretty well any appearance-related configuration was dropped in the upgrade.  Now I have to go through and fix _all_ of my toolbars.  Sometimes many times (I keep getting text on the KNode toolbars).  Aargh!  No tool tips on the new icons, either!  Maybe I'll have to keep the text.

7) Very minor, but you apparently get a choice of exactly two desktop backgrounds - ugly, or plain grey.  I don't mind being given the artist's choice as a default (I might have liked it - like the Gnome Heron background), but I should at least have been able to set it to a plain  background in a color of my choice.

8) Spell-checking - I'm not sure it's really true, but it _seems_ at least to be much more vigorous (and therefore annoying).  When I'm typing something like this, I should have to provide some sort of word-terminator, or a mouse-click, before it actually flags a word as wrong and underlines it. Now, any combination of 3 or more letters that isn't a word is underlined, even while I'm still typing the word - which means that I'm seeing red lines flash on and off all the time.  I love KDE's as-you-type spell checking, but this "feature" was obviously written by hunt-and-peck typists, who never actually see what's on the screen until they look up.

9) and I've lost my (vital) ksysguard applet which was displaying the temperature.  I daresay that will be easy enough to fix.
-- 
derek