With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 there has been a spate of negative publicity for this latest release, with a lot of people bemoaning broken upgrades and various other installation issues. Having only had 1 failure out of 7 upgrades, I thought I'd blog about my experience with the upgrade, and my thoughts on the new version of Kubuntu (since that's the particular flavour of Ubuntu that I use).
Kubuntu 9.10 comes with KDE 4.3.2, a very worthy successor to KDE 4.2. While KDE 4.3 doesn't have any big new features, it does come with a number of small enhancements that I find make the desktop environment slicker, friendlier and easier to use.
One of the improvements that stands out for me is the notification system. There is now a little (i) information icon in the system tray which "houses" all your notifications. Notifications pop up for a few seconds, and then disappear back into the icon where the longer-lasting ones can be seen again with a simple click on the icon. File transfers, which have always used the notification system in KDE 4, now disappear after a few seconds, and their progress can be seen by the "throbber" that appears in place of the info icon.
One of the overall improvements which is not KDE-specific is the speed of the desktop. My machine is noticeably faster and more responsive. My computer at work, with it's 4 gigs of RAM, absolutely flies, and my computer at home, with 1 gig of RAM, no longer occasionally feels sluggish. Boot times have definitely decreased, though that's not a major selling point for me.
So, overall, I'm impressed with the Karmic Koala. I wasn't expecting this much of a difference, especially since I had already been running KDE 4.3 on my home computer for the last few months. It's a refreshing and pleasantly surprising upgrade!
