Posted by Migo on Oct 26th, 2007
I promised a review of the newest version of Ubuntu Linux sometime this week, and I’m a man of my word. So, here it is, the initial rundown on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.
This is probably the best version of Ubuntu to come out to date. Having combined many of the configuration applets into more centralized applets make customization almost too easy in this version. With previous versions, using the Gnome desktop manager, to change your desktop theme you had to run through the following steps:
- go to your System menu
- select Preferences
- select Theme Manager
- set your theme
Now you can change you theme, background, view your fonts, customize your menus and toolbar interface, and customize your visual themes all from one applet by right-clicking on your desktop and selecting “Change Desktop Background”. On the same note you can manage your splash screens, login themes, wallpapers, and themes all from one centrally-located manager applet as well. Not to mention the Emerald Theme Manager that lets you build your own themes.
These applets are somewhat similar to Windows, so migration may not be quite as jarring of an experience. In this version of Ubuntu directories for photos, videos, music, and documents were included standard, also possibly to make the shift from Windows to Linux a little easier for anyone wanting to get a foot in the door with Linux. There’s also a port of Filezilla, the popular Windows FTP program, now available for Linux so that might help get more people to check out Linux as well.
Now it’s not all sunshine and lollipops with this distribution. There are a couple of things that I found that I wasn’t a fan of after I did my upgrade from Feisty. They aren’t many and they’re more annoyances than anything, but I’d like to keep things as balanced as possible.
First off was the fact that your mounted networks shares no longer seem to show up on your desktop when they get mounted. Thus, you can’t really be sure, at a glance, that they’re connected. You’ll have to navigate to their mount point to make very sure.
The second thing that bugged me was the fact that your Add/Remove Programs software doesn’t seem to sync up with apt-get update or Synaptic Package Manager. So you have to reload your sources.list file all over again. Granted, reloading the sources.list file doesn’t take much time and I never really use the Add/Remove Programs software so it doesn’t really effect me, but it might be a bigger deal to a user fresh out of Windows.
If all I could find to complain about initially from this release were these two very minor problems then there really isn’t much of a problem present at all. If you’re looking for a way to get into Linux from the ground floor or if you’re looking to get away from Windows altogether, I would definitely suggest this version be the one you look at first.
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