Recently I have been using the KDE4 desktop within Ubuntu and it has just blown me away with its ease of use and its eye candy. With its easy to use “start menu”, very nice widgets layer and all of the little effects that make it shine over the Gnome desktop that is present in regular Ubuntu. I have made note that I hate the color scheme of Ubuntu and the file management of the Gnome desktop. I honestly believe that Kubuntu should be targeted more to the new user of Linux than Ubuntu because of its ease of use and its graphics.

Here are a few things that are making me “switch” to the KDE environment.

Looking for a good place to learn more about Ubuntu or meet other Ubuntu users? Here are some websites that are dedicated to the use of Ubuntu.

-Loco about Ubuntu
-Ubuntu Forms
-Matt Hartley’s blog
-Official Ubuntu website
-Distro Watch

There are tons of other websites out there dedicated to Ubuntu and Linux in general, I am sure you have some other ones so please leave them as a comment to share with the community, and yes you can spam your Linux blog :)

Last August I bought myself an upgrade Hone Premium disk from Amazon to upgrade Windows XP Media Center to Vista. I have been using it off and on since then and just today I installed the newest updates for Vista and I received the image you see above. Im sorry but as a paying customer I will not deal with this bullshit, sorry for the language. I have already deleted my Windows partition and now have Ubuntu 7.10 as the only OS on my computer.

Microsoft goodbye its been a great 10 years. 

Ubuntu has silently made its way to my desktop as the primary OS of choice. There are litterly hundreds of things that I adore about Ubuntu but heres the top five, in no order.

• Customization, You can make Ubuntu look how ever you want! You can choose between different colors for the windows, change visual effects, and even change the whole desktop from Gnome to KDE if you like. Nothing is off limits in Linux and its a nice thing.

• Every 6 months it gets better, There is nothing more I love than a new version of Ubuntu and in fact we get a new one every 6 months. The Ubuntu team seems to make strides forward with the new updates, unlike another OS company, and every upgrade is a welcomed addition. 8.04 is just around the corner and with all of the new Alpha versions coming out it seems this will be the best version of Ubuntu yet.
• The community, Chances are if you have a problem with Ubuntu somebody out there has had the same issue and has posted a fix. You can expect to get lost for days inside the Ubuntu forums learning all kinds of new things. If you have a problem and can’t kind it just sign up for the forum and ask the question and some nice Ubuntu/Linux user will try and help you out. Once you start to use Ubuntu you join a community of nice,helpful, and smart people who will guide you through Linux experience.
• Free software, After installing Ubuntu you should have all the software you need to do things for school, home, and work. Of course this is all free and is of the up most quality. Just think the Ubuntu system updates you can expect to receive new updates for the software regularly. If you need any new software you can find it in the Add/Remove Applications section, which leads me to my next point.
• The process of installing and uninstalling software, Ubuntu is years ahead of OS X and Windows with the way you can install and remove software because of its ease of use. All of the software you will ever need is in one place and to install all you need to do is a “check” next to a program and hit install, thats it! Its the same to uninstall a program expect you remove the check mark, simple enough?

So whats the things that you love most about Ubuntu?

One of my previous posts about the things I don’t like about Ubuntu made it all the way into the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is huge for me because this is my first time getting recognized for my blog. This is the kind of thing that makes me love blogging, along with the great comments that I receive.

Since this is the night of the Oscars, I would like to thank the readers of my blog — thanks, guys! I would also like to thank the downfalls in Ubuntu 7.10 for giving me something to rant about.

In other news I will not be writing much this week due to family being in town, so please don’t think I have stopped writing on DIGGED.

The answer to this is a simple YES! Today I received two sticks of 1 GB RAM for my laptop to replace the existing two sticks of 512 MB RAM and I can honestly say that my computer runs like it never has before. Obviously upgrading any part of your computer will help, but with the various things running in the background in Vista (i.e. Sidebar, Windows Firewall, and maybe DreamScene), the more memory you have the better. It’s a crime to run with anything less than two GB. While running with 1 GB was by no means bad at all, sometimes things tended to freeze up or bog down. Here are some of the things that have improved dramatically with the 2 GB upgrade.

• DreamScene now runs smoothly with no freezing or slow video.
• The bootup time was cut by almost 10 seconds.
• Sidebar loads in a second now.
• Opening most programs is now instant and the most notable is Outlook 2007.
• Multitasking is now a non-issue for me, seeing as I always have over 60% of my memory available.

As I have made mention before on a few occasions, I hate the default look of Ubuntu! After a few hours of research I have the theme used on a version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Studio. Ubuntu Studio is basically Ubuntu with a new theme and some great multimedia and graphic programs that come preinstalled. I have never heard of this distro before today, probably because it’s not offered from the Ubuntu site, but it gives you a nice dark theme for Ubuntu, and finally some nice looking wallpapers! You can get the entire theme, including wallpapers, a screensaver, and the general theme, by typing the following code into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look

Here are some screenshots so you can see what it looks like before you install the theme.

I have made the decision to move to Ubuntu away from the world of Windows, which I have been with for over 10 years. There are a lot of great things with Ubuntu Linux and a few things that well I don’t like. Here are the top 5 things I think should be fixed/changed in the next few releases of Ubuntu.

5. The default themes. As I have mentioned before the themes and wallpapers that come with Ubuntu are just ugly! How about some adding in some wallpapers with color and some nice looking Gnome themes that don’t include the colors orange and brown.

4. Combine some items together. Why is the screen saver selection and the wallpaper selection in two different places? They should be in one easy to find menu.

3. Innovate file management. While there is nothing wrong with the current setup there is nothing special about either. I love how in OS X they added some new features like QuickLook and the Coverflow view, how about something similar to this in Ubuntu.

2. Ubuntu for some reason doesn’t find my iMac on the network and it’s kind of an annoyance. I do a lot moving files between my computers and it seems like the Ubuntu machine is isolated between my computers.

1. I hate having to use the terminal so much! Make it easier to do things and maybe be able to do it with a GUI. I hate having to go into the terminal and type some code to fix something, in the modern computing world this should be handled via the GUI. This is one thing that keeps people away from Linux, because they see it as too “Geeky”.

Update:

All of my problems have gone away since I have switched to KDE 3.5 with Kubuntu. The menu layout is just as I like and the overall looks much sharper than that of the Gnome desktop. It includes some great themes and seems to run smoother than Gnome.The “start menu” isn’t the greatest, but that’s probably the Mac user in me talking. I have grown to learn and use the terminal on a regular basis and its growing on me. I can’t wait for Kubuntu to feature a much more stable KDE 4.0, because that looks years ahead of Gnome.

To counter-point this I wrote a new post about the Top 5 Things I love about Ubuntu

As I have mentioned before I decided to uninstall Windows Vista Home Premium after several issues. This was not the first time, in fact I have reinstalled Vista at least six times on my laptop.

A friend of mine heard of my troubles and gave me a free upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate for my troubles — thanks! After installing it I was looking forward to using DreamScene, and after using it for a little while, I was impressed. It works well and is better than a plain wallpaper, but it is a memory hog so I have bought 2 gigs of memory for the laptop.

While DreamScene was running, my screen saver came on and when I tried to disable it through the Personalize section I got the BSOD — the first time ever on Vista!

After the computer restarted, Microsoft informed me that it was my video card and for me to update it to resolve this issue, but the drivers are up to date. Since then I have yet to get the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. I hope it was a random thing but I hope I never have to see it again — its scares the sh!t out of me every time.

The first year for Vista was nothing short of a failure to be honest. Many people have downgraded their systems back to XP or have moved to Mac or Linux all together. Then there is the other side where people are loving Vista and have had no problems, and trust me I wish I was one of them. I think my problems exist because I bought my laptop before Vista was released and it came with a sticker on the computer that reads “Vista Compatible” and thats why I think I have had the problems that I have had. I get labeled as a Microsoft hater but I am far from it, I wish Vista was the best OS to date, so I have listed the 25 things I think would help Vista.

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