Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta 1 is out and curious as I was, I gave it a try. I had some good reasons:
- The company’s remote access RDP client behaved funny with my dual monitor setup after messing with the Java runtime environment
- My Dell Vostro 3700 gets really hot really quick and there’s a known regression in the Linux kernel
The first one caused me to boot into Windows 7 again, which is at least annoying, the latter causes my CPU to run not at 1.6GHz which would be its nominal frequency, but 1.2GHz max, without Turbo-Boost. Luckily the CPU is still very fast for my purposes and 4 cores plus hyperthreading, 6GB RAM and a GeForce GT 330M help.
So I tried the update to Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta 1 which is well described here and which worked equally well, with one minor problem which was Dropbox: while it tried to reinstall or re-download the Dropbox Debian package, it was just sitting there…after 2h I killed it and then the install process continued. The fix is as simple as a
aptitude reinstall nautilus-dropbox
and that fixed everything.
Verdict
Most things look just as before with minor changes, some things are much nicer (Dolphin’s icons now move around nicely animated when resizing its window), and both issues I had with the previous install are either gone (no issues with the VPN RDP client anymore) or much better (temperature definitely decreased during normal operations)