Avinash Meetoo

For the past one and a half year, I’ve been a very satisfied Gentoo Linux user. I would advise all enthusiastic Linux users to install Gentoo at least once. It is a very instructive (not to say interesting in a geekish sort of way) process. Personally, I’ve learnt a lot about the internals of Linux thanks to Gentoo. Sometimes things get very low level but that’s Gentoo to me :-)

But all nice things must come to an end.

I don’t use Gentoo any more.

I’ve finally found the perfect distribution (TM).

Let me introduce the mighty Kubuntu, the KDE derivative of Ubuntu Linux…

The three most important advantages of Kubuntu over Gentoo (IMHO) are

1. It just works!
   • Configuring my scanner under Gentoo was not trivial (i.e. difficult). It worked without any configuration whatsoever under Kubuntu
   • Configuring Gentoo to work with a laser printer at work (HP Laserjet 4000 family) was OK but I had to download the driver manually. In Kubuntu, the driver is immediately selectable from a list.
2. Updates are much quicker!
   • Gentoo features portage which is basically an equivalent of the Kubuntu packages. One fundamental difference is that in Gentoo everything is compiled from source and, therefore, takes time (and, sometimes, lots and lots of time) whereas in Kubuntu, packages are precompiled and, hence, are installed in no time. Granted, Gentoo gives the user a much finer choice about the various compilation options and what really needs to be installed. But, I prefer Kubuntu’s speedier updates over Gentoo’s much slower ones. Life is too short :-)
3. Kubuntu is from Africa! And I am proud to be African!

I have (temporarilly) switched to AMD64 Kubuntu Linux from my normal Gentoo Linux. This switch might become permanent if I ultimately find that Kubuntu is better than Gentoo. That’s a really tough act as I love Gentoo ;-)

I want to really test Kubuntu (and, hence, Ubuntu) before installating it on Christina’s computer at work. I have decided to stick to the official packages. I want to be sure that Kubuntu is perfectly usable without having to download packages from unofficial (and difficult to find) repositories because this is the way I want Christina’s computer to be configured…

I have to tell you that I am very satisfied with the progress I’ve made:

1. Installation was a breeze. Everything except my ADSL modem was recognised right away.
2. Configuring the ADSL modem was easy thanks to detailed instructions written by some nice guy.
3. Firefox and Thunderbird were preinstalled and I had no difficulty importing my setting and files from Gentoo (as I am very knowledgeable :-))
4. I installed LyX, the rather wonderful document processor that I recommend to all of you, using apt-get which also installed the whole LaTeX infrastructure.
5. I finished by installing some programming tools for Haskell, Python and Ruby which are, IMHO, great languages. Forget about C, C++ and Java!

Everything is working really well. Might this switch become permanent? Only time will tell :-)

As read on Kubuntu’s website,

“Kubuntu is a user friendly operating system based on KDE, the K Desktop Environment. With a predictable 6 month release cycle and part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution for everyone.”

As you all know, I run Gentoo Linux at home on my AMD64 box and, after some months of tweaking, I can say I’m very very satisfied.

For some weeks now, Christina has been telling me to replace the Windoze 2000 she use at work with Linux. I decided to download the x86 ISO of Ubuntu as I didn’t want to install Gentoo on Christina’s computer as that took too much time. As I was using Jigdo, the Jigsaw Download[er], I had no trouble incrementally downloading the AMD64 ISO image of Kubuntu which I quickly installed on my home computer just to have a look.

To summarise, I’m impressed even though there are 1-2 small niggles I don’t like:

Positives:

1. Very quick to install compared to Gentoo.
2. Only one ISO image (1 CD) to download – the rest, if needed, is downloaded from the Internet.
3. Kubuntu feature KDE which is very nice looking and more functional than Gnome IMHO
4. Kubuntu is based on Debian and, therefore, features a fantastic package management tool called apt-get.

Negatives:

1. I don’t like the fact that there are multiple official package repositories (main, restricted, universe and multiverse) and countless unofficial ones. Sure, any software, however obscure, surely exists in one of those repositories. But which one??? This is impossible to tell without a lot of Googling.
2. In Gentoo, everything is compiled from source and, therefore, all libraries, development tools and headers files are always installed. In contrast, the installation program for Kubuntu does not install those essential components (they can be manually installed afterwards using apt-get though). As a lecturer and programmer, I find this very painful to do. For me, Gentoo Linux is out-of-the-box (if I can use that term) a fantastic programming (and experimentation) environment and this is clearly not the case with Kubuntu.

Nevertheless, Kubuntu and Ubuntu have a lot of potential. Worth a nice 8/10 I would say…