So, brief conclusions after installing Kubuntu Karmic Koala: - During the installation, the disk partitioning step took a very long time to open, and after changing each option it would lag again - After selecting all the parameters and hitting the “Install” button, everything disappeared, and only the blinking of the hard drive activity light indicated anything was happening. I launched a browser and spent 30 minutes surfing the web until a window finally popped up saying the installation was complete. (By the way, Wi-Fi came up right away, and I was installing the system in the kitchen) - After the nicely polished GNOME in Mint — the fonts here are ugly. Especially in Firefox. I’m not picky, I’ll live with it, but the difference is visible, especially fresh off the other system. - Coming from GNOME, KDE runs noticeably (NOTICEABLY) faster. Most likely because Mint has compositing enabled by default, whereas here it doesn’t. kwin itself seems capable of it, but I didn’t bother enabling it. - KDE, even in its fourth version, is still native KDE. Krusader, Krdc, Yakuake, Kopete — how much I missed them in GNOME! However — Kopete somehow refuses to connect to ICQ, will need to figure that out. - Plasmoids look pretty cute. In GNOME I had found Screenlets — a similar concept, but rough around the edges. Screenlets would regularly lose their settings — coordinates and desktop assignments. - It’s unclear whether the ATI video drivers got installed or not. I already forgot where to check. - Firefox, my favorite little monster, starts up and loads noticeably faster. Empty, without plugins — it appears nearly instantly. Maybe it’s because the profile is still small, but it’s pleasant either way. - Image viewing — Gwenview — has been redesigned, big time. It became really beautiful, stunning really. In GNOME all the image viewers are garbage. - The new file manager Dolphin I liked since KDE 4.0 days in OpenSUSE. Even though I’m not a fan of single-pane file managers, Dolphin is the most glamorous of them all.
Epilogue and summary: after listening to Bobuk and Umputun on their Radio-T podcast praising Windows 7, I installed it on my wife’s laptop (Athlon 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, some Nvidia GPU I can’t be bothered to look up). And I’ll tell you — Kubuntu looks much nicer, runs more smoothly, and lags far, far, FAR less on my slightly inferior laptop. The KDE 4 interface is unfamiliar, but I’ll gradually tweak it to suit my needs.