Over the weekend I decided it was time to attempt to breath some new life into my old laptop (a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 510m). This machine has served me well, but recently it has seen little use for various reasons, and inspired by the linux installs I'm seeing on a lot of netbooks, I felt it was time to experiment once more. As I continue to be impressed by the improvements in the *buntu distros, it was obvious I would be going down this road. However, as with previously, the drabness of Gnome in Ubuntu still left me with a bitter taste.

As KDE has long been my preferred front end, I headed over to kubuntu.org to see how things had come along. I was left in awe at the new interface in KDE 4, and sure enough I started the download, burnt the image to CD and booted it up.

Follow up:

When it all sprang to life, I was greeted with the live CD front end, which worked as the finished interface would do, and couldn't resist clicking the install button. Something you should know, this laptop only has a 40GB hard drive, entirely partitioned for Windows XP. Previously this would have been a problem, but not so now. Kubuntu's installer offers the option to resize the Windows partition, and use the created free space for the installation. Once I'd selected how big I wanted the Linux partition (10GB seemed a good start) it set to work. Within about 30 - 40 minutes I was fully installed and looking at my new Kubuntu desktop.

First thing that was brought to my attention was the need to do updates. This version of Kubuntu connected to the wireless network with the kind of ease I have only experience previously in OS X, so I was very impressed. Updated was a piece of cake thanks to Adept (the package manager). Then I installed a few necessary bits of kit, Firefox for one (Konqueror the web browser that ships with KDE is just not up to par for me), Thunderbird for another. I customised the interface (fonts etc) and now I have the system as I would like it.

Battery monitoring and power management are handled very well indeed, where previously Linux power management left a lot to be desired. Now my battery life is actually better than in Windows. This is made all the more impressive given my laptops battery is pretty much shot!

I'm still tweaking things, but I've had no major problems so far, and noticed that installing items like Flash is now much easier... almost as easy as OS X makes things. There's still a little way to go yet, but it's really good to see Linux continuing to evolve in the way it has. It still may not be a platform I would use full time as my primary OS, but my laptop is a secondary computer, and I can genuinely see myself using Kubuntu as the primary OS on it. For me that is the ultimate test, and so far so good.

I hope this trend continues, expect screenshots soon