8.10 impressions

[Lindsay Mathieson]

Well, since I managed hose my package dependencies and nuke my KDE setup 
(hint: don't use the Citadel hardy repo to install Citadel) I thought I'd give 
the Intrepid Beta a try. My home directory resides on a separate hard disk so 
its relatively easy.

The CD install is easier than ever, no difficulties with hardware etc. The 
manual partition setup made it very easy to select my second hard disk for the 
home directory without formating it, while erasing my old hardy primary 
install. From CDROM boot to up and running with a new install was 15 minutes, 
amazingly fast and straightforward. My sound, network, usb printer, keyboard 
and mouse were all correctly detected – particularly impressed with the 
printer detection, even got the exact model (Samsung ML2010). I was browsing 
the web right away, no doubt this was far faster than I could have with XP or 
Vista.

My LCD was being driven in native 1280x104 (VESA mode?) Of course my onboard 
nvidia 6100 was not configured but I managed to enable it via the restricted 
hardware applet. Had to hunt for that through the menus and it failed the first 
time. Second time was fine.

Nice new feature in the restricted dialog, like envy it gives you a choice of 
driver versions, for now 173, 177 (recommended) and 96.

Install Scores out of 10:
----------------------------------
Ease of Use : 10
Hardware Detection : 9 (Would be 10 if Canonical could auto setup restricted 
drivers).
Newbie friendliness : 9.5

Its really that good – I am way impressed. Anyone casually familiar with 
computers could be up and running with minimal to no hand holding – so long as 
they had non funky hardware :) But that applies to every system.

Desktop
-----------
I erased my Hardy .kde & .kde4 entries, I wanted a fresh setup – don't know 
how well they would have migrated.
It is KDE 4.1.2 of course, plasma through and through. I've got quite used to 
it, definitely way more usable than 4.0. I actually quite like the new menu 
now. Still sucks finding programs on it but once you get your favourites setup 
that's not such an issue. I'm a command line junkie anyway.

There's a decent set of plasmoid's in the repos now, but you have to know how 
to search for them (apt-cache search plasmoid) and how to configure them. I 
think there's a need for a plasmoid wizard here.

Kontact – still has all the same old bugs as ever, or more accurately Kmail 
does. IMAP works so long as you don't stress it. Forget about using the 
groupware features for anything except contacts. However it does look great 
and integrates well. And Aggregator is brilliant.

Hardware
-------------
Well all my hardware worked fine :) but nothing fancy there. However one big 
improvement which I presume is down to the new kernel – for the first time ever 
with my board sound still works after a hibernate or suspend. In fact Amarok 
resumes playing perfectly after a restore. This means I may never reboot again 
:)

Over all I'm really pleased with this release, normally I don't run beta's on 
my desktop but this has been well worth it.

-- 
Lindsay
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~blackpaw1/album