The Great Switcheroo

There is a God!

Just a couple of days ago, I decided to back up my system and lo and behold, within an hour or two of my having done so, my partition tables mysteriously disappeared and I had to re-partition and reformat my hard disk. I'm blaming it all on solar flares.

So anyhow, I'm left with one clean disk and no operating system to put on it. I'd recently finished downloading Kubuntu and so I decided to go ahead and install that.

Now anyone who's known me for any length of time knows that I've only every run GNOME on my system(s) since time immemorial. And I've been using Gentoo since the Universe first flashed into being. I firmly believe that the Earth is simply the result of an errant 'emerge world', which explains a lot of things.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to download ginormous source tarballs and sit patiently while they compile. Squeezing out that last drop of performance out of my system no longer excites me as it once did and quite frankly, I'm no longer convinced that looking at compiler messages as they flash by increases your intelligence. Portage has been a bit of a mess recently and by the end, my 3 year old installation couldn't compile some basic packages I needed.

GNOME too has become a bit of an embarrassment lately. I mean look at it! It's become all corporate-y and boring. It's like cola that's been left out too long; flat, sugary and unwholesome.

So it's been out with the old and in with the new. KDE replaces GNOME and (K)Ubuntu replaces Gentoo. And I'm loving it! KDE is absolutely brilliant to work with. It's very configurable and I absolutely LOVE YaQuake. Apt-get is sweet too and it's brilliant how little time it takes to download and install stuff. The installation was a breeze and the default application set is fairly decent. Of course, I have 'special' needs, but I can satisfy them fairly easily.

Kubuntu is really a lovely distribution and I plan to stick with it for a long time to come. Or at least until the next solar flare anyway...