Just finished restoring my backed-up stff from the network to my shiney new Kubuntu install. Here's some comparisons I've found from the old SuSE 9.1 Pro that Kubuntu is replacing:
1. Faster. Same hardware, same software, faster machine. It boots faster, runs faster and *everything* was detected out of the box. Even the weird-arse "sk98lin" network card :) Very impressive! 2. Sound works properly. No idea what the folks over at Novell have done to their kernel but the onboard sound (snd_via82xx) driver under SuSE would constantly barf with "invalid pointer 0x????? using last known pointer" at which point the arts daemon would have a fit and lock up the GUI for 10-15 seconds. Very annoying. Problem not seen on Kubuntu - very happy :) 3. nvidia-glx package - reason in itself for running Ubuntu/Kubuntu! Thank you Daniel Stone!! FWIW, the latest NVidia driver is 7174, and the latest [K]ubuntu package provides this version too - so it's pretty close on the heels of NVidia compared to SuSE, who are still working on the 5xxx driver :-/ 4. Still can't get Flash Player to work - but I think that's a side-effect of AMD64 hardware. Anyone else? 5. apt. apt simply kicks butt. Yast/urpmi/yum just can't cut it IMHO. After spending a year with SuSE, I've reaffirmed my view that RPM just plain sux. 6. grub looks better on SuSE. Call me a point-and-drool-luser, but the SuSE Grub splash screen just had that visual polish that isn't there in a default Kubuntu install. But as this is the only gripe I have about Kubuntu, it's really not that big a deal. It's just eye-candy! :P SuSE is a good distro, but skewed towards functionality over speed. I was honestly suprised with the speed difference between Kubuntu and SuSE 9.1! SuSE took about 45-50 seconds from kernel decompress to a useable KDE desktop (not including the odd arts daemon crash etc - see #2 above). Kubuntu is about half that! Seems the SuSE boot sequence got bogged down doing hardware detection and other crap...and it took about 10 seconds just to mount the NFS volumes (wtf?!). Anyway - big heart-felt congrats to Jeff Waugh and others on the Ubuntu/Kubuntu teams. James -- As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed. (Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3 on the linux-kernel mailing list.)
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