back to the 'buntu world

I kinda gave up on Ubuntu this past summer, feeling that I'd finally had enough of Canonical's relationship with Amazon, and of having Amazon stuff on my computer. Whatever. Ubuntu, anyway, is a great distro (with great repositories!), and most of the Ubuntu "flavors" or derivatives I've tried (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.) have been, in some ways, better than the parent. The Ubuntu repos, which (as I understand) draw a lot of packages from the Debian Sid repos, turn out to be great for other distros to use as a base.

With all that in mind, I'd been considering adding one of the 'Buntu derivatives to my lineup. Yesterday, I downloaded Kubuntu 17.10.1 ("Artful Aardvark") and tested out the live session. A couple of shots:

Kubuntu 17,10 ships with KDE Plasma 5.10.5, Firefox 57, LibreOffice, VLC media player, and the great KDE apps and tools we've come to know and love.

Here's a shot of my empty desktop, after a good amount of tweaking:

With the application menu opened up and the cursor highlighting Synaptic on the Favorites bar:

My desktop right-click and left-click menus, respectively:

The Discover Software Center -- the user could get lost for hours digging around in here:

Kubuntu also ships with the Muon Package Manager:

I don't know if Muon is any better than Synaptic, which is available in the repos:

My Compaq Presario CQ56 notebook has kinda weak specs; I've turned off most of KDE Plasma's special effects, and Artful performs well, but with a few minor graphical glitches that I haven't yet figured out how to fix.

I've used Kubuntu off and on over the years; it is never perfect, but it's always something I can work with. After some tweaking, I always seem to end up with a solid, dependable system. As I mentioned above, 17.10 ships with an excellent collection of apps and tools; I added a few more, and I think that the end result gives me a great Plasma setup to work with over the next several months. Looking forward to the LTS release!