Yes it did cause all sorts of menu confusion and other problems with both installed. But I REALLY liked what I saw of KDE vs Gnome and decided to just go for a clean KDE install. I have my /home on a separate partition so I blew away Ubuntu 9.10 and installed Kubuntu 9.10. Yes I know Kubuntu is not a great KDE distro but I definitely know I want to stay in the DEB family. I may consider trying out Sidux at some point as I hear its a much better choice. I just don’t think I want to go with Mandriva and I know I won’t use OpenSuSE. But anyway KDE 4 is really a wonderful piece of work. I’m not knocking Gnome but I get a much more put together and well thought out feel for KDE vs Gnome which now seems like a kludge of things and requres more stuff to be kludged on to get the same functionality. For example. This article talks about desktop effects and getting Compiz to work with KDE (which worked out of the box for me unlike what this article claims). But from what I’m seeing you may not need Compiz. Kwin is doing everything I want except one effect (mouse over opacity). Now when I turned on Compiz it did seem faster but make the whole thing kludgy again. However this is on a laptop with Intel graphics. On my Nvidia desktop it was VERY smooth and snappy.

You might ask yourself if its fair to make an assumption on a whole nation’s cooking based on one mediocre experience. And youd be right.

Which is the same thing Jack does by adding KDE to an existing distro, always a recipe for disaster. And on top of that choosing Kubuntu as the KDE4 desktop is really akin to the Arby’s analogy as well.

Im an Arch/Gentoo KDE user (KDE4.2 was ready to switch my parents to Linux) and am writing from Kubuntu 9.10 right now and the KKK9.10 is still not a top 3 distro in the KDE world.
I know you want to talk about the popular kids in school but it is still not remotely close to Mandriva 2010 in the KDE4.3.2 world.

But you are right, many people might want to try a new desktop on top of the one they use.
My experiences show this to be full of pitfalls and I think it that is one of things that have to be addressed.
Changing desktops is complicated for the non-geek Linux user and a big barrier to experimentation. (its almost easier to just use Virtualbox to test new desktops)
Adding a new version of a program that isnt in the repositories (long live rolling distros) is a daunting task.

My neighbor got a Dell Mini with Ubuntu and he hated it with a passion calling it the ugliest and most depressing OS ever made. He should have had an easy option to change desktops before he came to me.

Desktop choice are more important than distros yet very little info is given to users about them.
Still a major fail.

The author is saying that you must install a ppa repository. These repos provide unstable versions, the best is to keep with your distro KDE, in the case 4.3.1, and wait for the official KDE 4.3.2 for Karmic. DO NOT INSTALL PPA SOFTWARE.

Why to install KDE ? Well, everybody that have a hard disk in the computer can do. But the most important are the applications. For instance, k3b, okteta, gwenview, amarok are excellent “programs”. I do not use regularly GNOME desktop, but i use, for sure, dia and synaptic and others “GNOME” programs.

They are Linux programs, after all (well, not KDE anymore, because KDE is for Linux, Windows, OSX, UNIX, etc).

To install KDE, junt install kubuntu-desktop. Just this.

The repositories for Ubuntu 9.10 contain a new package called ‘kdebase-workspace’. This package installs most of the KDE desktop libraries. An Ubuntu user can then install most KDE packages and they will look and behave properly. I have several KDE apps installed.

A year from now the desktop ‘wars’ will break out again with the introduction of GNOME 3. Previews of GNOME 3 are exciting. The GNOME/KDE decision will be difficult indeed.