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For the last few years, I've been running the KDE version of Ubuntu, named Kubuntu, on my desktop computers (laptop and desk computer). The last few years, KDE has progressed a lot, and with a couple of exceptions I have been very pleased with my KDE based desktops. One recurring problem with Kubuntu/KDE however has been it's wireless connection applet; the thingy that manages your wireless connections on a laptop. Another one is managing multiple screen, which is supported by the KDE GUI, but for some reason never remembered and had to be redone for each reboot. Alternatively, I could "fix it" my mucking with Xorg.conf, which I've done on numerous occasions. Not fun, but certainly possible. And don't get me started on KDE audio. ALSA or Pulseaudio? The various "layers" and legacy emulators to get audio working everywhere, including flash is a puzzle I would gladly leave to somebody else to figure out, and save me the trouble. The wireless problem has persisted for several years, and other stuff, like the multi-screen management thing, simply doesn't seem to be fixed. And I don't feel like fixing it myself.

Since I mostly by the bleeding edge laptop computes, I've gotten used to some amount of tweaking to get my laptop usable, typically meaning installing more modern kernel releases and some bleeding edge packages from unofficial software repositories, or even from source. Because of this I've also given my systems the benefit of the doubt, in that it is probably my ignorance that breaks something when something isn't behaving properly.

The KDE version of the wireless applet is (or used to be) called knetworkmanager, and it has caused me and endless amount of grief. Another package, named wicd, seems to work better, but is typically not installed by default. But the last few months before moving away from KDE, it was wicd that managed my wiress network connections on my laptop computer. With some updates or similar (remember, I typically run bleeding edge stuff) the wireless stuff would still break from time to time, possibly because some update wanted to reinstall it's own wireless manager applet or similar, but I usually got things operational again without too much effort.

With the default desktop on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 not looking completely like a turd any longer (previous version was all brown...), I decided to reinstall linux on my laptop, using the default Gnome based desktop. It worked perfectly. Even the wireless thingy required no tuning. Audio works flawlessly, in all apps, even flash. Dual screen setup; no problem. GUI assisted, and saved for later. Even discovering and installing the "non-open" nvidia video driver was GUI assisted. I was so pleasantly surprised that I even reinstalled my desktop computer with it, and it worked just as well there.

I certainly have some gripes about Gnome as well, which I will write about in a separate post, but all-in-all, Ubuntu 10.04 has given me a nice looking very usable desktop, without any need to muck around to get the basic system up and running. So from now on my preference (and recommendation) at least for people who want to give Ubuntu a try, will be to recommend the "default" Gnome desktop, and not Kubuntu.