Kubuntu KDE 4 Rave

[Lindsay Mathieson]

Just setup up a new PC for my wife - MiniITX Atom, passive cooling on the 
motherboard - whisper quiet and easily powerful enough for her needs - email, 
web and card/strategy games.


Up to now she's been Windows XP all the way but she agreed to give Kubuntu a 
spin as XP is definitely getting past its use by date.

First off the install, Kubuntu 10.04, done this a lot now :) Booted off a USB 
stick. 

As usually quite fast and painless, especially onto a blank PC. Hardware 
detection - flawless, sound, USB, ethernet, video & effects all worked perfectly 
without any configuration. Took 15 minutes. I remember the XP install taking 
over an hour, and I had to trawl the net for drivers.

Couple of stand outs:
- Wireless has been a pain in the past but this time - My Billion USB 
Wireless, plugged it in, Network manager auto detected, popped up a dialog to 
auto create a connection with all the local wireless networks detected. Picked 
mine, put in the pass phrase (WPA2), stored it in KWallet and its worked 
perfect every since, auto-connecting on every boot. The XP machine was 
continually flaky with it.

- USB Printer, a Samsung Laser ML-1740. Went to add it to the print manager 
and found it already auto created with the correct drivers and ports etc. Just 
worked. Gob smacked.


Wine - she had a few old windows 95 shareware games. They all worked fine under 
wine. Except for Civilisation II. And freeciv while good - doesn't really 
replace Civ II. Pity that one.

She really *really* likes the KDE Card & Strategy games, much better than the 
windows ones. My complements to the creators of KPatience and others, they 
look so professional and slick, they make a huge impression.


The KDE4 Desktop effects leave a good lasting impression too, the blurring and 
various other subtle effects integrate well.

Dropbox - her documents where already stored on Dropbox, it was trivially easy 
to get that working on Kubuntu. X-Fingers that OpenOffice 3.2 can cope with all 
her Office2000 docs.

Looking very good so far, hopefully another Linux Convert! Not that my wife 
cares :) just so long as it all works. But much less support headaches for me.

-- 
Lindsay
http://blackpaw.jalbum.net/home