Wednesday 15th August 2012 10.59pm

Courtesy of my shiny new 256Gb #Samsung 830 #ssd replacing that #POS #Sandforce SSD 60Gb boot drive which died, I have the space to install Linux alongside Windows for the first time in some years. I've always been a #KDE man personally, I find it's close enough to Windows I don't have to think too hard, so I fired on a copy of #Kubuntu 12.04 LTS. Last time I tried a desktop Linux was (unsurprisingly) Kubuntu 10.04 LTS, and well while a surprising amount hasn't changed, 12.04 LTS is much slicker to install.

For one thing, Kubuntu cold boots on this SSD in about five seconds. I'll time it for sure next boot, but it's blindingly swift and makes Windows 8 look slow. Another thing, this is the very first time Ubuntu/Kubuntu didn't need graphics drivers for my ATI card installing before it would work properly - the ATI open source driver is now good enough to turn on desktop effects too, so everything is very slick. For some daft reason it sets 1152x864 clone on both displays as the default (neither monitor is that resolution), but a quick dive into the Control Panel and multi monitor with native resolutions is configured and more importantly, working out of the box. Another thing: is it just me, or does Linux feel much faster on a SSD over a hard drive than Windows 7 on a SSD over a hard drive? Maybe they've done a ton of optimisation since 10.04 LTS, I honestly don't know, but it really does fly. And my PC is five year old hardware, so it's hardly state of the art (the SSD can run about twice as fast reading and writing than my motherboard is capable of heh).

All in all it's looking good. It's still easy to confuse-crash KDE apps though. They really ought to fix that instead of having it as a old familiar feature. On the other hand, it wouldn't be KDE if it didn't crash when you click in ways it wasn't programmed for :)