I installed the beta of Kubuntu 8.10 on the desktop machine I'm using now and found a few flaws here and there. Installing the proprietary nVidia driver made the on-screen text microscopically sized. I needed to add an
Options line to xorg.conf to make the text readable again.
OTOH, Intrepid had support for my Linksys 802.11g USB wifi device which failed to work under any versions of Fedora including, as I recall, the F10 release candidate. I like the look of KDE 4.1 better than 3.5+ as well, though I wish they'd hurry up and include the patch to enable
auto-hiding of the panel. It's especially annoying with some tall dialog boxes that for some reason can't be resized (Thunderbird's address book entry screen is one). I can't see the buttons at the bottom of the dialog box.
Audio support seems a bit schizophrenic as well. Some apps like SMplayer are configured to use Pulse by default, others use ALSA. I've settled on ALSA since I don't need to share audio over the network. KDE's former standard, arts, doesn't appear well-supported at all. Perhaps it's been deprecated in KDE 4+ even though it appears as an option in application dialogs?
What was even more impressive was how well 8.10 (final) installed on my daughter's Inspiron 640m laptop. I no longer needed to install 915resolution to get the Intel graphics to display correctly. Even better was that I could configure NetworkManager to start the Intel wireless device after logging in. On the earlier version of Ubuntu she had (Feisty?), we'd always have to start the wireless device manually. On the down side, the wireless LED now flashes periodically which is extremely distracting. There's
talk about this on the Ubuntu forums already because it's so annoying.
I do find the one-CD approach of Ubuntu a bit of a pain. I don't really understand why they don't distribute DVDs with all or most of the packages the way Fedora does. I'm constantly having to install things over the network like nfs-server or even Firefox and Thunderbird because they're not defaults with Kubuntu. The most obvious omission is openssh-server which is something I use every day on almost every Linux machine I manage.
I'm still wondering where some of the old KDE control panel items have disappeared to, especially things like power management. The kcontrol application doesn't even appear as an option in the Intrepid repositories any more (KDE4 change perhaps). I'm also going through the RH -> Debian transition needing to figure out how to designate which services start at boot for instance.
Still I might end up sticking with Ubuntu for a while after this release, at least on the desktop. I doubt I'll stop using CentOS on servers, though.