Andreas Rydberg

A week ago I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my "new" laptop, my company was throwing it away because it was old, and I didn't think much of it. One thing that stood out was the network manager, it was a breeze to get it to work. The other thing was the new load screen and login screens looked really cool. These two changes may only be superficial but this version seems really polished.

Yesterday I installed the new version on my desktop and was blown away about the snappiness of the desktop. After the login the desktop loads quickly and every part of the desktop responds fast. Starting Firefox takes about 3 seconds. Nautilus starts within a second and so does every new folder that is browsed.

In previous versions of Ubuntu the desktop has always been slow and sluggish for me. I don't know if it has something with my hardware configuration. It's been the same, no matter if I activated the proprietary Nvidia driver or had Compiz Fusion 3D effects turned on or off. The idea of going back top Windows XP has crossed my mind but I shrugged that thought off, I don't want to go back that.

I don't know why it's faster this time around; if it has something to with Kernel Mode Setting or something else... but it's fast and snappy!

I hope the next version of Ubuntu, 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", continues this path. I think 10.04 will be even more solid and polished because it's a LTS-release (Long Time Support), that is supported with updates for a longer period of time than the normal releases.