Kubuntu 10.10 - Tiny Review

[RoyGBiv]

I may come back later and give a more in-depth review. At the moment, I'm still evaluating it and so cannot say much with any authority. I've been running it since it came out in a virtual machine, but the live environment is always different.

The main thing I want to say here is that for the first time ever in my memory a Linux distro has recognized and configured all my hardware *correctly* via the installer without me having to do a single thing manually.

This includes:
- Canon Pixima Printer
- Wireless Networking USB Dongle
- Nvidia Graphics Card
- High-end Logitech Gaming Mouse
- Sound
- Five Separate Hard Drives, SATA/PATA mix, with 8 Partitions

At one time or another each of those has given me problems with one or more distros. Usually it's just the one thing, not all of them, and the graphics card has most persistently given me fits. Not this time.

This is the first time I've honestly been able to say, "It just works."

The installer also recognized, for the first time ever, that I have more than 4GB of memory and installed the proper PAE kernel so that I could address all of it in a 32 bit system. (I've been running 64bit Linux Mint 9.04 for awhile now and have loved it, but I do still occasionally run into issues with the 64 bit that bug me. Plus, except with certain things, I haven't experience that much of an improvement in performance to justify continuing to use it.) I've grown accustomed to having to do a kernel change first thing with distros that don't allow you to choose yourself beforehand. I was stunned.

Anyway ...

If you like the KDE desktop environment (and I do) I can tentatively recommend this even for newbies.