For nearly two years now I’ve been using Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE) quite happily. It was a happy marriage between us, but yesterday we filed for divorce.

Kubuntu Gutsy, and Hardy, had been fine. I’ve even been using KDE4 since 4.0, but recently KDE would just, for no reason and with no warning, corrupt the screen and return to the login screen. When this happened yesterday in the middle of some (as ever, unsaved) work, I snapped.

The courtship of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) began, and the divorce papers were served to Kubuntu.

Another reason to abandon Kubuntu was that most of the applications I used were all GNOME based, so essentially I had a KDE/GNOME hybrid. It had the look of KDE for things like Amarok and K3B but the look of Windows95 for things like Firefox, Thunderbird et al.

After a quick test of the Ubuntu 8.10 in LiveCD mode I saw that most of my needed apps (GIMP and those mentioned above) would be installed by default. And I’d only need to manually install Scribus and Thunderbird.

One quick backup later and Ubuntu was installing.

my spanking new Ubuntu desktop

What was yesterday. I’ve been using Ubuntu now, exclusively, for a whole day and, I have to say… I like it! I can definitely see a speed increase in Thunderbird and Firefox, in KDE they were ok to use, but a bit clunky and ugly – hence why I, at one point, switched to using Opera as my browser. I can get a decent screen resolution too, which I could never get in KDE. Ok so I lose Amarok, but Rhythmbox seems quite adequate. Not tried it, but Brasero seems more than capable of burning a CD/DVD.

All in all, I feel like a new man.

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