Kubuntu 7.04: The best distro yet for Windows users?

[dbarrow]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=374?tag=fdjust

...The first thing that struck me about Kubuntu is that while Ubuntu reminded me of Mac OS X, Kubuntu reminds me of Windows (maybe Windows 2000/XP). It looks good. I know it's just cosmetic and that under the hood Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the same thing, but the application of a brighter, clearer UI and a task bar makes using Kubuntu look and feel more "normal." ...

[Tortanick]

While the Desktop environment is the only difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu, the author is clearly uninformed if he call that change mealy cosmetic.

And I've heard rumours that Canonical dosn't give Kubuntu the same love as Ubuntu, I hope their false

[Dudeking]

*coff* bag of ****e lol

I don't really like ubuntu or any of its little friends lol
It's written for little kids, dosnt appeal to me at all...

[Tortanick]

tried Debian yet?

[Dudeking]

No thats about the only one I havnt lol

Why??? How bad is it?

[Tortanick]

Its brilliant, I'm using Debian Lenny now. Debian the parent of Ubuntu, with the massive repositories (although all the packages are official, rather than Ubuntu's rather small main repository) and the beautiful Apt. And none of the "for kids" fluff.

Debian is an old fashioned distro that assumes that if the user knows how to change stuff he knows what he's doing, focuses on stability, is amazingly fast, tries to avoid non-free stuff by default wherever possible, thinks flashy effects are just another package rather than the core of the distro, and is built by a large democratic/meritocratic community rather than a corporation.

You can grab an installer (not a live cd) from here
http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/debian-installer/ go for the netinstall iso. If you want a gui install type installgui at the first prompt. If you're a KDE fan don't install a desktop environment, that's Gnome, just go without and log in to the command line as root, then type

apt-get install kde kdm synaptic
(some people recommend using kdebase instead of KDE to avoid getting stuff you don't want. I never saw the point myself) After that hit synatpic and and install what you want. Trademark issues mean that firefox is called iceweasel, and thunderbird = icedove.

Also be sure to enable the contrib and non-free repositories to get flash, binary drivers and java. windows codecs and libdvdcss can be found from this highly trusted unoffficial repository.
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/

[fleamailman]

love kubuntu, I have most of my computers running it now, point is that if one knows what one is doing then kubuntu is not for you perhaps, but if you want something straight forward, easy to install and with windows shortcuts, in short in you are someone ready to get off the windows sheep dip then this is for you. Later when and if you want to try something harder then there are many many types of linux to choose from.