While I almost completely switched to Arch Linux for all of my computers, my wife is still an Ubuntu girl, and probably always will be. She just loves it, and all of her computers run it. She recently purchased a netbook that came with Windows 7, and she immediately wanted me to wipe it and put Ubuntu on it. While I offered to install the UNR version (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on it she made it clear that she just wanted standard Ubuntu, and that’s what I did. In addition, I inherited a netbook as well, though I decided that I would give the UNR edition a try.
On both of our netbooks, wireless is a bit flaky. On my wifes Acer Aspire One, the wireless card works out of the box, though on my Dell Inspiron Mini 1010 a Broadcom driver is required to make it work. While wireless works on both of our netbooks, once you put either netbook in standby mode, there is no hope in getting a wireless connection again until after you restart the machine.
To make matters worse, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Dell is very unpredictable. Sometimes when I boot it up, the wireless driver just doesn’t activate, and other times, it will go into low-graphics mode for seemingly no reason. I can’t really blame Ubuntu for the horrible support for the Poulsbo graphics set that it came with since a good driver was never released, and it’s certainly not their fault either that the Broadcom driver isn’t in the mainline kernel. However, with neither netbook able to get a connection after resuming from standby, one has to wonder.
In regards to the theme, I have to say that the new XSplash bootup theme seems to have really grown on me. Having a single Ubuntu icon on the screen while booting up is simpler and more to the point. It lets you know that your computer is doing something, but doesn’t shove the word “Ubuntu” in your face with a big font. In fact, the GDM theme is pretty cool too, but the desktop theme seems to have had the opposite effect.
While it was nice to have a different theme for once, the default wallpaper and widget themes just have to go. Thankfully, there are some really beautiful themes included as optional themes by default, and most of them are much better than the main one.
One small problem with 9.10 that irks me more than anything else is the recent change of the mouse properties. In all previous versions of Ubuntu, you could disable the touchpad on your laptop. In 9.10, the developers thought it would be an awesome idea to remove any way of disabling the touchpad. Due to this reason alone, my wife may move backwards to 9.04 because her netbook has a really annoying touchpad. Removing the way of disabling the touchpad was a VERY stupid idea and whoever thought it up should be ashamed of themselves, and/or reprimanded.
While Ubuntu 9.10 wasn’t perfect, I have high hopes for Ubuntu 10.04. In fact, I predict that it will probably be the best version of Ubuntu released yet. I’m sure with the negative press that 9.10 received, it will probably be enough to convince the developers to make the right changes.