An Interesting Blog Post about Linux

I came across an interesting blog post called "Why Linux Still Sucks", and I have to say that on some fronts I agree with what Adrian is saying. Things have not changed much with Linux usage, and desktops in recent years. GNOME is still GNOME, and KDE, well KDE took a step backwards with its 4.0 release. As far as the gaming, OEM support, and hardware issues listed in his post, there is still little support from larger companies catering to the Linux crowd.

Earlier today Ubuntu released some screenshot images of Ubuntu 10.04. The images do not look too bad. Most people do not stay with the default theme anyway because the brown theme that Ubuntu had wall a little too poopy. Maybe users will now keep the default theme. It is starting to look suspiciously like a Mac desktop....

Empathy Gets No Sympathy

Pidgin used to be a default install in Ubuntu, but was recently dropped in the most recent release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I occasionally used Pidgin on private chat server that was used a part of my regular employment. It is something that was not used all that often, maybe a couple of times of year.

This past week I needed to connect up to the chat server and gave Empathy a try. After a few minutes of fiddling around with the settings, I could not get it to work. Part of the problem was that I was not familiar with the set-up in Empathy, and the set up screens did not match-up at all with the generic set of instructions that are provided by my employer.

I am not sure why there was a change in applications in this latest release of Ubuntu. Pidgin seemed to work just fine. I found it in the Software Center and installed Pidgin. The nice thing I found was that you are able to remove Empathy as well. In the past, some applications in Ubuntu were tied to the ubuntu-gnome-desktop package, and individual packages were not able to be removed.

I am back to using Pidgin. In this case, I am just to lazy to track down how to set up Empathy and Pidgin properly. But Empathy, you'll still get no sympathy from me!

Chrome in Beta for Linux

You can now head over to the Google Chrome Website and grab yourself a copy of Google Chrome for Linux. It is the beta version. I have been running a developer build of google chrome, which is an unstable release version of Chrome for some time, and have had very good luck with it.

The only thing I have noticed is that when you load a Google theme, the colors along the border are not rendered quite correctly for some themes. I am not sure if it is something within GNOME, or whatever. I assume it will get fixed. Either way, it is not a show stopper for me, since most of the themes work just fine.

Since I am on the developer release, I am going to stick with it for now. There are versions for Redhat/Fedora as well. I use a CentOs box at work, and will try the Google Chrome Beta there to see how it works. I assume all should go well!