A Quick Review of Xubuntu 12.10 Beta

A beta version of Xubuntu 12.10 has been released, and I decided to take it for a little test drive. There is a new desktop wallpaper, new icons, and a couple of new themes.  Overall the remaining software packages are generally the same. The just are running newer versions.

Abiword example, is still used for its main word processor, and Firefox is still the default browser.  Abiword is a good clean word processor with minimal frills.  I like it, but prefer the features that come with LibreOffice. After a quick visit to the software center, I was able to get LibreOffice installed with no problems.

In Xubuntu 12.10, and also the vanilla flavored Ubuntu, LibreOffice has been upgraded to version 3.6.  One big change that I like in this latest version of LibreOffice is that there is now a status window that provides total word count for your documents as you type along.  This one little change is enough to get me to want to upgrade once the stable release is out next month. That is because I am a little bit of a word count geek.

Here is a screenshot of Xubuntu 12.10 with the new Blackbird Theme. You get a nice clean desktop and are able to concentrate on getting work done without a lot of flashy widgets and gimmicks. Kinda nice!

Overall, I have found the Beta version to working just fine. However, it still is taking to long to open a folder in Xubuntu because of some sort of conflict with gvfs-backend. Use this fix if you are having a delay when opening a folder in Xubuntu. I hope that bug is fixed soon!