Off Topic With Ashley

Things I’m liking about Ubuntu 10.04:

1. Dark themes work now, and they work deliciously.
2. The lack of browns is refreshing. Orange and Purple sounds weird, but it’s quite well done.
3. The inconsistencies between Compiz and Metacity have finally been ironed out, so well I’m not even sure if Compiz is still there.
4. The Ubuntu Software Centre while still a little confused interface-wise, is starting to look a lot more useful. PPAs appear as browseable providers so third parties can join in the fun, and Adobe Flash is available through the “Canonical Partners” repo.
5. There’s an Ubuntu flavoured Gwibber theme.

Things I’m not liking about Ubuntu 10.04:

1. The new themes are distracting and seem incomplete. Fact, I’d probably go so far as to say they’re appalling. Politics now dictate the window buttons appear on the left hand side of the screen and some irritating-as-fuck quirk sees them swapping from the left to the right seemingly at random.
2. There’s now two system trays. I don’t know what’s going on, but the “Indicator Applet” can apparently be used to show things other than email and notifications now. In particular LottaNZB uses it in the most irritating way possible to show a drop-down menu when you click the icon.
3. The crash reporter is crash-happy itself and will pop up to let you know applications have crashed, whether or not they’ve done so.
4. The default Nouveau driver for nVidia graphics is incredibly, gratingly slow. The proprietary nVidia driver works fine, but it’s ugly as sin and doesn’t have all that much benefit over integrated Intel graphics for what I’m doing. (I have a slight case of buyers remorse because this card  takes up two of three slots in my PC and I’m not using it for anything.)
5. I can’t hibernate (although I’ve never got this machine it to hibernate, ever). Whenever I try, the entire process goes without a hitch, except for the fact that the computer turns itself straight back on and resumes whatever it was doing. Really annoying.

Verdict: I like Ubuntu. But damn the new window decorations are campy and irritating.

New Computer

So I know Owen at least was wondering what was in my PC, so here’s the general idea.

I’ve an Intel E2140 system which I inherited from Tatey some time ago as a games machine. I bought an extra two gig of RAM to take it to 3 total, and upgraded the video card a while back to a GeForce 9600 GT which I noted previously has such a massive fan, it obfuscates my PCI slots so I’ve only got one usable.

I got myself two disks to make the machine usable: The first is a Western Digital “green” 1TB disk which I’m using as a backup system, and I’ve also got an OCZ 60G Agility SSD which I’m perfectly aware is blisteringly slower than the offerings from Intel, but has made an incredible difference in my system performance anyway.

I originally bought it because I wanted something quiet and more efficient, and didn’t pay that much mind to the speed benefits so I was blown away at how much faster it makes a system. The rest of my hardware may be meagre but it performs gloriously and is very fast and all that.

I’m eventually hoping to upgrade the rest of the machine as well, but I’m not that concerned considering how well the damn thing’s running.