As I have posted earlier I have been using Ubuntu for the past few months and was reasonably satisfied with 9.04. When 9.10 came out in Oct I upgraded to it using the built in upgrade and since then I have been having issues with the install. (Most of them caused by the upgrade process according to forums)
The first issue I got hit with (which I never really solved) was that my desktop no longer allowed me to put icons on it. Basically the Desktop work area (or whatever they are calling it in KDE4) disappeared. It wasn’t that big a deal because I hardly use the desktop icons anyway (I use the ‘quick bar’ to start most programs) but still irritating.
The main issue I found really irritating was that the fonts on Gnome applications (X-Chat, Thunderbird, Synaptic) were not controlled by the KDE control panel, plus every time I rebooted the fonts would reset to the default settings (size 6 for the gnome apps) and I would have to run the gnome-control-panel and then click on the Appearance link and then close the application (without making any changes) to set the fonts to a normal size.
Then I guess I made some changes to the system before my last reboot. The reboot was after 5 days and I had been fiddling with the settings, so I don’t know exactly what I changed but the end result was the the entire display would dance around everytime I moved my mouse (or tried typing). Now since I had been meaning to do a clean install of 9.10 since I had upgraded I took this chance to backup my system and do a clean install instead of troubleshooting.
However the problem with the fonts is still there. Another irritating thing is the way all the tools/programs (like vim, gcc, ssh server) that I have come to expect to be pre-installed on a system are not installed. So instead of installing all these packages again, then fighting with the fonts issue and then removing all the eye candy and special effects I am going to remove Ubuntu from my system and go back to a plain Debian install. I will be installing the Testing or Unstable version but it will be a plain install.
I am not saying that Ubuntu is a bad system. Its just not the right system for me because I happen to find a lot of eye candy to be very distracting when I am working. I don’t want the entire window to show when I am tabbing through them, just the name and the icon are fine. Plus the wiggly window border is really annoying for me.
You might have a different criteria than me and might like it better. Although, for a new user Ubuntu is certainly the easiest to setup.
– Suramya