Switching to Ubuntu
Posted by geetarista May 11, 2006
Recently I talked about (K)Ubuntu being my choice as the best Linux distribution for me. Things were working out fine for me, but the only problem that I had was getting my Linksys WMP54GS to connect to my router in Kubuntu. I tried to find how to do it all over the internet, but none of the tutorials and help that I found didn’t work. So, while reading a topic in the Ubuntu Forums, someone said that everything works better by installing Ubuntu, and then just to install the KDE packages after that. This way, you can use the original KDE instead of using an adaptation for Kubuntu.
So I downloaded a new DVD for Ubuntu, which led me to a few more problems. After downloading and installing the first time, I kept getting an error that meant that the ISO I downloaded was bad. So I re-downloaded the ISO again and burned it to another DVD. I soon got other problems when it was installing packages saying that it couldn’t read the DVD and that I should burn the ISO at a slower speed. I did that two more times, and kept getting the same problems. I thought all hope was lost, but I tried messing around with the installer (I don’t really remember what I did) and everything started working. Instead of trying to install the packages after installing the base system, it restarted the computer, started loading Ubuntu, and then installed the packages with no problem. So, after a few nights staying up late trying to get it to work, I finally got it.
Since I made the change, I think that the system is running a little better by just using Ubuntu and installing KDE. Moreover, most people use Ubuntu, so many of the tutorials out there are specific to Ubuntu and may not work on Kubuntu. Personally, I think that they should just put KDE with Ubuntu and get rid of most of the confusion from having two separate distributions. Isn’t that the whole point of Linux anyway? Having options? What if someone is turned off by the way Gnome looks to them and decide to go with another distribution because it has KDE, or worse, go back to Windows. It happened with me–I tried Ubuntu about a year ago and didn’t like Gnome, so I decided to go with Mandriva because of the way it looked.
I think that one problem that Linux veterans have is that they believe that what they want or like is what others want, like, or even need. I thought that my wife would like KDE because of the eye candy and other cool features. But when I showed it to her, she didn’t really care for it. After all this happened, I was working in Ubuntu installing packages and updating the system, she said “Oooh, that looks really cool!”. I thought What?! But she just liked the color scheme and the way it looked. Maybe it’s something that we all should pay attention to.
