Happy Hump Day!

   If you’re not in a military family, you’re likely not to know what Hump Day is. Heck, even if you are in a military family, you mightn’t know.

   But nevertheless today is Hump Day, huzzah!

On Windows 7…

   …Trying to enable Aero, gosh darn. It’s still pretty awesome, it’s neat messin’ around with the improvement upon your current OS. Although, to be honest, it feels like Windows 7 = Vista SP3.

Tweet me up

   You can follow me on twitter, if you like. My username is Talos18.

My Take on 3 Flavors of Ubuntu

   This is just something that I’d like to toss out there. Of my four virtualized PCs, 3 of them are flavors of Ubuntu (the other is Windows 7 beta). All 3 Ubuntu derivatives are running on 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are each running on 1 GB RAM and 128 MB video memory. Xubuntu is running on 256 MB RAM and 32 MB video memory (it still ran perfectly on half those resources, btw).

   Here’s my take:

Ubuntu:   How the heck do people live with this OS? I’ve read that if you tweak it to the umpteenth degree it’s as good as or better than Windows Vista. I sort of find this hard to believe, but then again, I haven’t tweaked Ubuntu to the umpteenth degree. I don’t really have the time to sift through thousands of software packages to find a bunch of stuff that’s gonna make Ubuntu look a bit nicer, when in reality it should look nice (or at least decent) “out of the box.”

   If Ubuntu wants to compete with Windows and Mac OS X, Canonical is going to have to ship it at least looking a lot better than it does. To be honest, I remember Windows 98 SE looking a lot better. By default, GNOME looks like some bubbly, ugly interface literally designed for children. I can see how they’d want to emphasize their “Ubuntu/Linux is way easier to use than Windows”, but the interface isn’t so much “so easy a child could use it” as it is “designed to be eye candy for very small children.”

   Anyway, while I personally find it fun to do things the command-line way, I’m sure that most people can’t make heads or tails of it. And that’s probably frustrating for your average user that would like to be able to double click a file to get it to execute, instead of using sudo, navigating to the file directory, and executing the “sh ./[filename.*]” command on their file. Being able to just double-click a file is nicer/easier/faster.

   Other than that, I guess it’s okay. If I didn’t want to shell out the money to buy a closed-source OS, then I guess Ubuntu’s an okay way to go. I still have yet to try OpenSuse, OpenSolaris, and Open/FreeBSD, or Fedora, though. They might be better, I dunno.

Kubuntu: Kubuntu is… well, I dunno. KDE is a bit prettier than GNOME, but it’s still kinda… weird? It just doesn’t work for me, I guess. In my opinion it’s very pretty awkward, but I guess some might call it innovative. My favorite part of Kubuntu? The nifty part of the login where it’s loading the file system and such, and it fades the icons in when it’s done with that part of the login process.

   My least favorite part of Kubuntu? EVERY OTHER APPLICATION AND IT’S GRANDMA STARTS WITH “K.” Oh my God, that bugged the crap out of me. I couldn’t stand to go through the start-up menu for anything, because of that. I don’t know if it’s my OCD or what, but that was freakin’ annoying.

Xubuntu: I tried Xubuntu in the past on an 8 year old machine, and found it frustrating. Then I tried Ubuntu, and found the same frustrations there (ergo my frustrations stemmed from general Ubuntu stuff, not Xubuntu-specific stuff). I appreciate it much more now that I’ve tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Xubuntu is just the way to go, in my opinion.

   It’s much faster and more efficient than the other Ubuntu derivatives, it’s not at all cluttered, and it looks nice by default. I no longer have any Xubuntu-specific grievances to hold against it. It’s a fairly viable alternative to modern, closed-source operating systems, especially if you’re using a computer that’s of the older persuasion.

 

   So, um, there you have it. I’ll be uninstalling Kubuntu, and using Ubuntu and Xubuntu a little when they need updating or I find software that I’d rather test before installing on my main OS (Vista SP1). That’s enough Ubuntu-related rambling from me (for now). Ta ta, enjoy your evenings.

It’s been a while

   Long time no see, eh? I had a sort of relapse with my exhaustion recently, and so I haven’t really been online much at all for nearly the past two weeks. I guess I’m just posting so that anyone who checks back to this blog will know that, no, I’m not dead (yet).

   By the way, I figure that I’ll make this more of an actual blog, where I don’t just post art but also rants and ravings and my opinions on stuff (like software, politics, philosophy/theology, etc). A blog, basically.

   I hope you’ve all been well. Talk to you again sooner or later.