I've just installed Xubuntu 10.04 - and it rocks. It's based on the Xfce window manager, which while it can do all the fancy stuff associated with KDE and GNOME, defaults to boring. So nothing fancy, just a classy looking interface with multiple workspaces.
One of the things I like about GNU-Linux is that the operating system tends to be far less CPU and memory hungry than other commercial OS, leaving your PCs power to be used on the stuff that matters (like the applications), rather than on a nice animated file transfer monitor, for example. But recent linux windows managers have included more and more of these bells and whistles, hoovering up CPU and RAM. What's worse, in Kubuntu the window compositor appeared to cause the system to hang sometimes.
In the 90s I was working with fairly simple IRIX and Solaris (and even Sun OS!) systems - in those days an operating system provided the ability to open windows, use multiple workspaces, and a clock, which is pretty much all you really need. Xubuntu provides this, in an uncluttered and accessible format - no plasma dashboards, cashews or pop up notifications.
[I still find it extraordinary that the concept of multiple workspaces hasn't been taken up by Microsoft - but then it did take them an extraordinary length of time to steal tabbed browsing from Mozilla.]
There are some advances in functionality too - wireless access works out of the box, rather than requiring 2 days of faffing about with wpa-supplicant as it did with Kubuntu 9.04. Perhaps most excitingly, I can now watch my best of the Two Ronnies DVD with Gnome MPlayer, which previous players have stubbornly refused to read.
There's a live CD downloadable from here - recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment