After a bit of a lagging installation I find myself, having just clicked the “don’t restart” yet button, wanting to show off a feature I found completely by accident. A now included Plasma Widget for Facebook pictured below and the nano blog widget.

Desktop networking

As you can see both of these widgets speed up not only you access but interaction with the two biggest Social networking sites, as well as of course identi.ca for you micro-blogging-open-source gurus out there.

The standard desktop looks quite nice, albeit a little slow but fair’s fair – I’m still running from the live-cd at present so that will pick up when I boot.

The biggest problem I foresee with Kubuntu is my beloved firefox. It still seems to run perfectly well, but I still feel compelled to use Konqueror; being its native browser and all. I’ve heard mixed reviews about Aurora; the webkit-engined, Qt4 powered browser alternative but I don’t believe it has yet reached version 1. I hope it doesn’t peter out like Midori for gtk, that browser looked so great and fast but was plagued with bugs.

Nevertheless it does seem to have grown up quite well. I’ve liked the levels of integration with your files and computer before, often being handy, but I look at Konqueror now and it is wondrously streamlined. A nice short browser header as I like to think of them. The area where you find your address bar and various buttons etc. There’s nothing worse than a browser with so many toolbars have your page real-estate is eaten up!

But that’s all for now, it’s getting late. I need to restart.

More to come as I find it.

Rebooting now…

But I think I’m just grumbling. So many people criticize ubuntu for the fact it’s brown and orange.. but so what. The easiest thing to do on a Linux computer (for me personally, in Gnome) is change the theme and general appearance of your desktop.

Everything can be customized. Don’t like the brown? Fine, it takes seconds to change it. If, like me, you prefer a simple, sensible desktop and just want to make the odd few changes here and there – you can.

But sorry I’ll stop now. Rant over. I guess that’s why the forum phenomenon “flame-wars” are called as such, the battles are often over but the war carries on..

More wallpapers can only really do good for Ubuntu and the huge community that enjoys and supports it, maybe I’ll do a couple of my own..