Review: Kubuntu, one year later

Back in November of 2008 I attempted to migrate to KDE. That migration proved to be a lesson in futility and you can read my review here.

Today I installed Kubuntu 9.10 on three different computers to see how much progress this once awesome distro has made in a year. This is what I found:

I've tested what I felt were the necessary areas; text editing, web browsing, networking, package management and personal file and message security.

Desktop - The desktop itself is absolutely beautiful on all three computers. Kudos to whomever is in charge of desktop aesthetics.

Kate - Kate used to be an excellent editor when Kubuntu shipped with pre-KDE4.x but it crashed more than once while attempting to edit a simple text file in Kubuntu 9.10. And what's up with the different word wrap settings in several different places? It's confusing. These problems were evident on two of my computers.

Konqueror - I visited LXer.com and, after a very long time of attempting to load the site, I was presented with the LXer logo on an otherwise blank page. I attempted to load slashdot.org and the site took several minutes (yes, minutes) to be displayed. I went back to LXer and was finally presented with the normal page. I also found that Konqueror isn't supported nearly as well as Firefox. These problems were evident on all three computers.

Networking - It's horribly slow. Running sudo apt-get update takes several seconds before anything even happens on the screen and then it sits for a few more seconds before the sources begin to update. Running Konqueror made me feel like I was back on dial-up internet service. These problems were evident on all three computers.

Package management - I installed seven apps from the official repos, which took quite a while, and several of apps didn't have an icon in the menus. These problems were evident on only one computer. The dpkg app showed an error in installing a package on one of the computers but worked fine on the other two. Every subsequent update/upgrade resulted in an unsucessful attempt to install that package again.

Dolphin - I copied a folder into another folder and the copied folder never showed up until I manually clicked View > Reload. These problems were evident on all three computers.

Kgpg - after installing the app, I click on its icon in the menu and nothing happened. I got a bouncing lock under the cursor and an entry in the panel but they disappeared after some time and Kgpg never appeared on screen. These problems were evident on all three computers.

So what's up? Is it that the Kubuntu team is making too many changes to KDE before shipping Kubuntu? I don't have any of these problems on any of my computers running Ubuntu 9.04. You'd think that networking and CLI package management (apt-get) would work the same on both distros. Isn't Kubuntu simply Ubuntu with the desktop environment and GUI apps replaced with KDE equivalents? The Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD was faster and more stable on all three computers than Kubuntu 9.10 was after being installed to the hard drive.

My opinion is that Kubuntu hasn't made much progress in a year. Can you imagine what a Windows user trying to migrate to Linux would think if Kubuntu 9.10 were the first environment they attempted to use? What would be their overall opinion of Linux? I stand by my opinion that Kubuntu is hurting the Linux community and the Kubuntu dev team really needs to go back to KDE 3.5.9 (which worked quite well) and rebuild their once awesome distro on that. However, pride and closed minds often prevent good things from happening.