I agree, I'm new to linux and I LOVE KDE, I love you too Gnome!! IceWM...sorry lol. I know IceWM is a window manager, bah!

well after 2 months of using it i can only think of very few bad issues

1. BAD debian made package support
2. i would love for video card driver to be installed automaticly instead of finding a toutorial
3. the universe and multiverse packages seem a bit out of date and personally i think that blows and i really dont care if its on freeze or what ever the excuse is .. if you want the top of the line distro you must keep your packages up to date simple as that

I'm using ubuntu warty. Hardware is a four-year-old HP Pavilion desktop PC: Celeron 800Mhz, 256 MB RAM. I've been running ubuntu for about three weeks now.

Impressions:


Installation is fairly painless if you wish to follow all the defaults. I wasn't able to configure it to dual-boot with my existing SuSE partition, though. SuSE's installation is warmer, fuzzier, and was more dual-boot friendly. Devs, if you're reading this: it would be great if dual-boot configuration were easier out of the installer.

My one unusual piece of hardware is a Linksys 802.11b wireless PCI adaptor--to use this, I must run ndiswrapper. Unlike SuSE, which shipped with ndiswrapper in the install CD/iso, I had to compile and install ndiswrappr myself. not hard, but now I can't apt upgrade-dist without breaking ndiswrapper. I already raised the possibility of maybe including ndiswrapper on the install-cds, but several knowledgable types on #ubuntu told me this wasn't a priority (!) and that very few n00b users would even be able to configure it, so why bother? I disagree, but that's a matter for another time.

Multimedia support out of the box is crippled...err...limited to free (as in speech AND beer) formats like ogg vorbis. Luckily, the ubuntu wiki on restricted-formats is very straightforward.

I'm already behind the times, but I'm pretty content with gnome 2.8. I find it easier to tweak to my liking than KDE 3.2, which I used on SuSE 9.1. I'm quite happy with it. It is fairly responsive on this machine (whose resources are pretty limited, compared to a new computer). I would like to investigate fluxbox sometime, though.

Most things have "just worked," or have worked with a little bit of tweaking. Provided a n00b isn't running any particularly difficult hardware (wireless network adaptors, say, or winmodems) he'll find ubuntu far more friendly than SuSE or the other RPM-based distributions. apt/Synaptic's automatic dependency resolution has eliminated many headaches. The packages may not be totally up-to-date. For me, this is not of critical importance, though.

Warty has been remarkably stable for me, and I've been extremely pleased with the entire ubuntu experience throughout. I would install it for my mother provided she and I had a long chat about what precisely she needed, so that I could set it up right the first time. Once set up, this will run pretty worry-free unless things change (but I guess that's true of Linux, generally).

I like it, but I always find myself wishing it was as stable as fluxbox...
and then I remember how anoying flux box is

I wont tell why i like Ubuntu because many ppl have done it already and i can just "echo *"...

One thing i noticed is all people say they need to compile GUI mplayer. That totally absolutely wrong.
Just add this line - deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main to /etc/apt/sources.list and then update and install mlayer. and it has a fantastic GUI...

Rohan.

Rohan I ment that there is not gui mplayer in Ubuntu offical repositorium

chris : right.

Wonderful, I'm confidant I'm qualified to relay some real life experience with Ubuntu, both Warty (stable) and Hoary (unstable or testing).

I used Warty on an old P3 system for 2 months. Hardware included P3, 384 MB RAM, GeForce 2 graphics and SB live sound card.

The Good: easy to install, detects a lot of "older" hardware out of the box, stable 2.4 kernel, decent support especially for things like getting Totem to run media files (change from gstreamer to xine, add w32 codecs and libdvdcss, etc), installing nVidia drivers (use package manager), great sound support for emu10k1 (a no-brainer for Linux these days), automatic network setup to include Internet, LAN and SMB. Also easy to setup printers. Another thing, it's Gnome-centric which I like, although this is obviously a personal preference. It's a good distro for newbs, however, there are some issues.

The Bad: default setup has no root login (this can be fixed easily, however), it's Gnome-centric (some people hate Gnome and getting KDE to work can be a real challenge). Several programs like Firefox need to be upgraded right out of the install in order to get the newer functionality. ALSA also outdated (v 1.0.6) so forget about using Audigy 2 unless you upgrade to 1.0.8 (not easy for a newb). Printer sharing can be a challenge though this weakness exists in other distros. It somewhat castrates you even if you enable root login, this will not go over well with experienced users and power users. If you don't install from expert mode, you better have a blank hard disk and be willing to mount all folders in 1 partition, it doesn't offer you options from the default setup. There are other issues too small to mention, but there are worse issues as well.

The Ugly: the big one, if you update it, you better be good at fixing Linux problems. This is a big one and I'm not the only user who experienced this problem. Apparently the package manager (Synapatic), will allow upgrading of certain parts that shouldn't be changed while running X. There is really no warning that this is happening. You'll won't realize what happened until you try to start X again, it won't. Also, certain upgrades will be allowed, again with no warning, that will bork your system and keep you from booting it. This is what ultimately lead me to wipe it and restore my Debian Sarge install on that rig.

Bottom line for Warty, would I install it? If I were I newb that didn't intend on doing anything other than using it, maybe. Problem is, eventually you'll have to upgrade parts of the OS, kernel, distro, etc. So I guess the answer is no.

As for Hoary, I won't go into the gory details and many people will tell you "it works great on their system" implying there's something wrong with you or your system, but trust me, you don't want to go there. It's extremely unstable! Do not install Hoary unless you like fixing Linux problems! And, as we all know, it's tough to fix Linux problems without root privileges. This is a huge knock against all Ubuntu distros in my opinion. It may be Ubuntu's attempt to have a more secure distro but can be a major issue if something goes wrong. If you do like fixing problems, you can help Ubuntu work out the bugs by installing it and reporting the multiple issues you run into on a daily bases just doing normal computing tasks. I've heard they intend on making Hoary "stable" in April. I hope they're burning the midnight oil, there's a lot of work to do on that version.

I cannot dessagree more. In my opinion Ubuntu is stable and all upagrades I made were made perfictly.

By the way KDE missing is not bad its yust option. If you like Kde use mandrake suse or debian.

Ubuntu is GNOME.

But if you really want KDE on Ubuntu there are pleny tutorials where is writen how to do that

how does it compare in usability to knoppix 3.8 and simplymepis 3.3? once i get back from my vacation in france (i return next wed) i'll be installing oneof those or ubuntu (should i go hoary or warty?).

HI
I tried Mepis, Ubuntu, too, but why just a flavour of Debian ?
The real stuff is much better, of course, you need to pay a
little more attention when installing, because you have to config
Xserver xfree86, but you know how to get things working, then.
Mepis crashes when you try to update with Debian packages,
so why bother ? In Sarge, you have a 2.6 kernel, which is quite
nice ! I let down Mandrake and even Slackware and I stick to
Debian, because you can learn about Linux and how it works
(same with Slackware )

Cheers

my system is :

Toshiba Satellite A30
256 DDR
30GB HDD
Intel Video Card

Good Things:

1-Fast,simple,brief installation (You dont have to know lots of linux stuff)
2-Default Desktop is GNOME and i love it and use it all the time.
3-New releases every 6 months which means you can use your programs always update.
4-Stable,Fast.
5-After adding some lines to sources.list file, you can download lots of programs.
6-Hardware support is really good. I didnt have any problems.

Bad Things:
1-Default Theme
2-Some programs are missing which i use all the time. Like ; Mplayer,Kontact,etc...


I am using it for 2 days now. i installed warty before but couldnt understand it. But read some articles and installed HOARY. I was using mandrake 10.1 before.

Because they add polish and ease of use. Debian is a "hardcore" distro - it's great for geeks but it's not suitable for everyone.
Depends how you define "better".
Exactly!
That's your decision and no-one will fault you for it. Debian's respect is well deserved. But not everyone wants to "learn how Linux works" - they just want a stable OS that works and does the job. Does everyone need to be a mechanic before they are allowed to drive a car? Of course the knowledge of how it works is always useful, but some people have got other (better?!) things to do with their time.

Andy B

I sugest you try Ubuntu Hoary. Its stable and has pretty much every thing what you need. but if you want KDE you shuld install knoppix. When you install knoppix you install debian with KDE.

But give gnome a try. Change default theme if you dont like brown and thats it you have eyecandy sistem like Debian with KDE