Kubuntu VS Ubuntu... again

So Natty has been out for a couple of weeks now. Some of my computers are up to date, I'm honestly not sure which ones are, I guess that's a good thing because it means nothing can be seriously broken!

I still feel like I want to be using Ubuntu rather than Kubuntu because of performance but rather than do a direct comparison I thought I would just list stuff day to day that I think I might miss if I moved to Ubuntu. I'm sure there's stuff I would prefer in Ubuntu but I don't know because I don't use it yet!

Day One

Now using Guake because Yakuake takes too long to open, something to do with screen effects. Guake is pretty good but it doesn't seem to support splitting the window horizontally and vertically. It also doesn't support opening the terminal on the screen the mouse is in.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you cannot set any windows in Gnome to open on the screen the mouse is in.

Panel - I like to have a panel on each screen and set the panels to only show the windows on that screen. Can't do that in Ubuntu.

Window opacity, I can take a website design and overlay it over my browser window. Sure you can use some browser plugins but I quite like doing it this way.

Skip taskbar, some taskbar entries are a waste of space if they appear in the tray too. In KDE I can manually hide these.

Kruler & Color picker.

The klipper menu shortcut seems to not exist any more. Fix it, there are lots of people that want it back! For those of you that don't know, it's a lovely little clipboard feature that stores your history, you can set a shortcut to open the history at your mouse location. Very handy especially for copy username, copy password, paste, paste, log in! Ultra fast with middle click highlight/paste.

Day two

It's actually about day 5 but I haven't been paying attention. My colleague that sits next to me has switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu so I can see what he's finding in Ubuntu. Just saw that you can maximise to half a screen and it kinda works with dual monitors but doesn't seem as easy to do as it is in kde. Oh and what's with the window resize handles still being so small?!!

Perhaps I just don't like Gnome rather than liking KDE a lot. Gnome does have poor support for KDE applications. There is also Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Xubuntu-desktop seems to install fine and it's supposed to be pretty light weight and if I remember correctly it integrates Gnome and KDE applications well. I tried installing Lubuntu but it said it would remove Kubuntu-desktop and Xubuntu-desktop. Not quite ready for that, would my beloved Kontact and Amarok still work? Anyway, trying, Xubuntu right now and so far I like it. System tray integration for Kontact is good, in fact the system tray seems to work in the same way as in KDE which is a real bonus.

For now, sticking with Xubuntu but I would like to give Lubuntu a go.

Oh, also I've decided I no longer use Konqueror, although one feature that really is very useful is the Filesize view. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I know there are dedicated programs for filesize view but I can't remember what they're called right now.

Day three

I gave Xubuntu a go for a few days. It was good, partly because it had nice tray integration and it was similar to both KDE and Gnome in some ways. It's a bit of a step back in terms of eye candy and some user interface niceties so I had to go back to KDE.

My main laptop isn't actually running Natty yet, so I should probably upgrade and then test Ubuntu/Gnome, haha, as I said that, the KPackageKit reminder just popped up to tell me Natty is available. I don't know, maybe I'm getting too old to be deciding on a Window manager. I've given Gnome/Ubuntu quite a few goes and each time I find something horrible, or a feature I love in KDE that doesn't exist in Gnome. Perhaps I need to find some features in Gnome that I really can love.

to be continued...

Submitted by oliver on Tue, 10/05/2011 - 16:22

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