• Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been laid to rest

POk, I finally got around to back up everything and upgrade my Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to the latest stable Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Herron.

Let’s get something straight from the start. The reason I’m using Linux has to do with KTorrent’s ability to somehow bypass my lousy ISP’s bandwidth throttling. Using KTorrent in Linux allows my BitTorrent to run full speed.

Apart from the joy of BitTorrenting at full speed, my experience with Feisty in other areas of computing has been disappointing. Here’s a list of problems from the top of my head:

• Shutdown does not power-down my PC most of the time.
• Out-of-box, I had to install all needed audio/video codecs to play DivX, XviD, RMVB, AVI, WMV and various formats. Lotsa tinkering with configuration files involved.
• I have yet to figure out why ‘Heroes of Might & Magic V’ doesn’t render graphics correctly in Wine. Granted, I’m using ATI graphics card and I realise that could be the problem. I’ve tried to play a few Windows games in WINE but till this day, I’ve yet to experience any success.
• K3B has ruined so many blank CDs and DVDs it’s not even funny anymore.
• Coming from Winamp as my main MP3 player, I find Amarok mediocre at best. Amarok has lots of features but perhaps I’m old-school and doesn’t find them necessary. Amarok lacks sound enhancing plugins (DFX for Winamp, for instance) and I found myself wanting because my pair of $50 PC speakers sucks.
• Kubuntu’s main photo browser, Gwenview, felt sluggish when compared to ACDSee in Windows. Try having 500 photos in a folder and have Gwenview browse it. It takes 20 seconds for the thumbnails to load. Now subject the folder of 500 photos to ACDSee, it loads in a jiffy.
• Transferring files to/from USB flash drives or external USB HDD (NTFS, in my case) is very slow. In my case, it can go down to as slow of <1MB per second. Imagine that.

I’m sure I could list more problems but hey, this is a free OS so I can’t argue with that. Just had to live with it.

Anyhow, I’ve upgraded to 8.04 Hardy Herron. I’ll give it a few months before giving my 2 cents.