This weekend I decided to upgrade my desktop to the latest version of Ubuntu. I've been happy with Ubuntu for the past few years, but version 9.10 (aka Karmic Koala) left me with rather mixed feelings.
The installation was straight forward. I removed the current hard drive and installed to a new and empty drive. This way I can very quickly recover my previous state - just plug in the original drive and boot up.
Ubuntu looks good. The "polish" on the interface was apparent. But, it seems the price for the polish was stability, and I was forced to manually restart my computer a few times due to lockups that also took out the keyboard.
Now, to be fair, I know my usage patterns are not "normal", or the "target demographic". I'm a developer, power user, techie, etc. I tend to do things with my computers the average person doesn't. In this case, it was the KDE desktop. I installed some elements of KDE (Konsole, Kate, dolphin), then later decided to just install "kubuntu-desktop". I chose to use the KDM login manager, and then restarted the computer (because Ubuntu removed the CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE option of restarting X-Windows, and also removed any option of restarting X from the login screen).
KDM came up as I would expect. The KDE desktop did not. Instead, I was presented with the "Air" wallpaper image and a terminal window in the upper left corner. But instead of a typical window, there was no title bar, and no borders. Keyboard combinations were NOT working, so no Alt-F2 to start apps. So I started up Firefox from the command line and began doing some digging. I couldn't find anything useful - the description of the problem is toooo similar to other popular phrases. So I decided to reboot. Er, wait. Clicking the menu items in Firefox did nothing. None of the menu items worked. There was also no title bar or border here. And no way of switching back to the terminal underneath Firefox. So I had to drop to a terminal via CTRL-ALT-F1 (hit it twice), and manually stop KDM.
At this stage, I wanted to get back to a "stable" instance, so I did "sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm" and opted to use GDM for login instead. Then when I fired up GDM I chose to enter the GNOME desktop. This then presented me with some errors about a .kde directory not being writeable. Which explained the initial problems with KDE.
Long story short, I was able to get KDE running (recursively chown'ing the .kde directory in my home folder) , but it proved unstable. And the regular Gnome desktop also proved to be unstable.
I have Ubuntu 9.10 also installed on my laptop. While it IS running better there, I do see some tell-tale signs of troubles.
While I understand the large scope of building a Linux Distribution. I want something stable. If I wanted to tweak config files and fight inconsistent behaviors, I would still be running Gentoo. As a commercial endeavor, I expected more from Ubuntu. And more importantly, I KNOW that KDE is not as unstable as I have seen. This is seems to be a case of Ubuntu not working with the KDE system properly.
So, I'm off to find another distribution. Debian is a little too restrictive for my tastes. Suse, Mandriva, and RedHat use a different package manager than I'm used to (RPM versus APT). Gentoo and Slackware require a little more management/maintenance than I'd like. So now I get to explore some of the lesser known alternatives. PCLinuxOS looks interesting - based on Mandriva but uses APT. I have the luxury of multiple drives, and a little patience, so I can try out different things. But I think Ubuntu is going to take a beating on this release unless they fix things soon.