Kubuntu on the desktop

I had a hard drive fail last month, leaving me with a single, 500GB HD containing Vista. The drive that failed (a 1.5 year old Maxtor: fail is the right word) had Ubuntu and SUSE 11 on it.

I haven't had the time or money to install another hard drive, so this last weekend I stole 50GB from Windows G:\ and installed Kubuntu 8.10 Beta because I love KDE 4.0.

It's great to be back using Linux on a regular basis again, but I still have one gripe that has persisted from distro to distro; the difficulty of getting Flash and Java to install and work in Firefox. It's not a minor inconvenience, it's a major pain in the butt. If Macromedia and Sun want their content to be appreciated by everyone who uses the web, why can't they work with developers to make both applications easier to install and use?

I love Linux, but I'm not going to claim it's perfect. Linux has made great strides in becoming more user friendly. But if it can't figure out how to make common and necessary applications work for us geeks, how can it hope to ever become the desktop of choice for the average computer user?

Tags: flash, java, kubuntu, linux, windows

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Comment by Michael on October 24, 2008 at 1:59am: I so hear you. I recently experimented with ubuntu, mint and finally fedora 7 -- There was much I liked about the whole opensource concept, but then there were things I was really miffed about. I will stress I am not a power user, so any complaints are undoubtedly part my fault. I do build computers as a hobby and enjoy tinkering with the hardware end of things, unfortunately I am sorely lacking in user skills. I mention this because one of the main things that drew me to linux was the compiz fusion 3D cube and other effects. Trouble was, no matter how much advice I took to heart regarding how to get these effects up and running, I never could. I installed the programs, 9compiz fusion etc) installed a decent video card capable of way more than needed, and the computer itself was more than capable of getting the job done. I know the root of problems with most average users is the fact linux takes more than the usual amount of fussing with to "get with the program" so to speak. Then theres the fact that, from what I hear, certain linux programs are apparently not compatible with certain chipsets etc. I would love to have a linux box up and running with all the bells and whistles. I will say, while I had the OS's themselves installed and running they were pretty much reliable and bug free. In everyday tasks it was a good experience, but one thing I missed was being able to send someone a page just by adding it to outlook express. right now I live in an XP world because it just works. Heres hoping the linux community gets it together so we can all have a viable option to windows.