Yesterday I upgraded my main computer from Kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) to 6.06 (Dapper). It’s probably one of the most painless upgrades of any that I’ve done: I few lines changed and typed, and apt-get does it all.

I’d even say Kubuntu (or Ubuntu) was so easy to upgrade that it’s almost ready to rival Windows or Mac for usability, except for one step: something about the upgrade shot my Nvidia graphics drivers, meaning I had to SSH into the computer and reinstall them. No big deal, but not something I picture the average user being happy about.

There seems to be better sound support in this latest version. Firefox and Flash on K/Ubuntu are known to have sound problems, but adapting this fix to my 32-bit-Firefox-on-64-bit-Linux-setup, I added a file named “firefoxrc” with just one line (FIREFOX_DSP="aoss") to /usr/local/firefox32, forcing Firefox to use the ALSA sound server. Setting the system sound server to ESD allows me to avoid the usual conflicts between the Flash and system sounds.

One cool feature of this version of KDE is 3-D representation of desktop switching, pictured. Not really that useful, but fun to play with.