Jaunty

YESS!!!!! The new Ubuntu Jaunty is on my computer (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, which is officially alpha, erm, 6, right now). Hey there are a few bugs but it's an alpha, it's actually much more stable than the alpha of Gutsy or even Hardy was. Although the name 'Hardy' really does suit that particular LTS release of Ubuntu. It is hardy to the most foolish of people, and is crash-able by only the people who want to crash it, like me. I kernel panicked it once, but only by deleting some major system file in the /boot folder! But the alpha of hardy? That was a different story: 1) open a gtk dialog. 2) click on the desktop. 3) click on the gtk dialog. 4) there is no 4. Reset button please. That's just one particularly awful bug I found in hardy alpha though.

Anyway, back to the original topic. Jaunty. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Ubuntu kinda, but lately the development has seemed to have, erm....hit something hard, and...fell over shall we say? yes there are things here and there like, um, new popups (those are a real improvement and kick windows's ass on that front btw), plus a new computer 'janitor' that cleans up junk on your computer. And it uses the ext4 file system, of course, which reduces fsck times by about a magnitude of 25 (if I got my estimates right, that is). But apart from things like that, things the general user wouldn't even notice if he/she wasn't a geek, things really do seem to have hit a plateau on the development front. I really haven't noticed many new features, so if it continues this trend I might consider switching to something with a faster development cycle. The trouble with them is that, with that there tends to be the fact that it's still quite a new and undeveloped distro, like gOS for instance (which is based on Ubuntu I believe).

On the KDE side, things are looking bad. Not bad, worse than that...erm...you can think of any word and it won't be quite bad enough to describe the badness of KDE4. It is UNUSABLE. UNUSABLE. Can't use it. I have reinstalled KDE4 three times, reinstalled my system once, then reinstalled KDE4 another time, and each time it has the same fault: it just won't work. I try launching a program and it freezes. why couldn't they stick with KDE3.5 for $&%@ sake? It worked and it was damn good. Sorry KDE guys, but I'ma stick with GNOME for the time being. KDE sucks big time.

On the windows side, things start to be getting better, bit by bit, slowly but surely recovering from the miserable days of Vista, the second worse windows distro (actually, make that the worst. I'd take win95 over vista any day :P). Yes, low-IQ person, I'm talking about windows 7 if you're wondering. I've installed the Beta of it on my machine and...well...things are at least a bit better than Vista. It's supposed to be faster than vista, haven't noticed that yet but I haven't been doing anything intensive on it apart from a few games of GRID (and that's not all that intensive even on max settings). From what I've seen of it, I wouldn't pick it over XP x64 though (which I use right now for anything that needs Windows).

Oh btw I had some hardware additions to my computer:
New harddisk. 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1. One Windows XP partition, one Linux /home partition, one Linux root partition, one Linux swap partition. £70 inc. P&P
New GPU!!! nVidia 9800GT 512MB GDDR3 RAM PCI express x16 (duh). £100 inc. P&P