[nmglug] Ubuntu Distributions,

[Ted Pomeroy]

To All, and especially the small group at our last meeting, Hello and
thank you for interest and comments about the new Long Term Support
editions of Ubuntu. I think that I will switch to Kubuntu for several
reasons:
1.It is customizable by the user, giving the user controls over what
software runs and the settings for that software.
2.KDE is a community project, and 'Unity' is a corporate project
originating out of the goals and workings of Canonical. They are still
a good curator/gatekeeper for selecting and tuning from the Debian
repositories which makes it easier for me to use programs. Canonical
in Ubuntu does work out the incompatibilities or conflicts that
sometimes arise between packages.
3.KDE is menu based, and I happen to like menus and a system that
works like a list of contents or an index. It will mean learning a
slightly different lest than Gnome 2.x, but seems better than other
options at this time.
4.KDE and the 'K' packages have some very good things I already use,
especially Kstars. It will mean learning the settings menu and a new
environment: Qtk instead of gtk, but I guess that will have to be part
of the effort this year.
5. I confess I like the easy way Ubuntu allows addition of the NON
Free bits, which enable Flash and mp3 and some dvd playing. We
certainly are in a crush of loss of freedom and I may change my mind
on these eventually. (Keep reminding me of my errors, all you purists
and higher beings.)
I will not be installing right away, there is a full year to go on
Lucid 10.04 LTS. I may even extend my use beyond the support as I did
with 8.10.  I will be using a live disk of the latest stable version -
11.10, Oneric, which I have already downloaded. I may also try
Xubuntu, as an alternative. But I really like all the tweaking
available in KDE versus other current options. May someday I will just
use Debian stable and pick and choose in the Debian repositories
directly.
Thanks for your thoughts, see you next meeting, Ted P.