Ok, so I’ve walked a mile in Kubuntu shoes and overall I am mostly impressed with it…

If your main uses for your computer are browsing, Email, some word processing, some spreadsheets, photos, and music, then Kubuntu 8.04 is ready for prime time.

If you are involved in heavy writing and number-crunching, development, GIS, large file operations directly with NTFS and Samba, and other CPU-intensive operations then Kubuntu 8.04 needs some help in the stability department. Reliability of services, error recovery, and file/file archive operations (especially across my mixed wired/wireless network) were revealed to be the Achilles’ heel of Kubuntu 8.04 for me.

Additional problems encountered (that would affect GUI-oriented users especially) are system integration issues between Konqueror and Ark, as well as smb4k.  With Samba set to “share” level access, it still (within KDE on Kubuntu) creates file sharing problems that the average user would be ill-suited to remedy without getting really greasy with the command line and vi (or joe).

The bottom line? For my day-to-day work, I’m not going to be able to use Kubuntu 8.04. But, I am now watching it more closely than ever before. I’d be willing to bet that by the end of the first 18 months of its support life it will be much closer to something I’d be willing to use on my production machine, but this whole sudo thing (even though you can “undo” it) is a real pain…many menu items need to be changed, some things get broken when doing away with sudo, and overall, the one-password-fits-all model continues to make me insane (it simply should NOT be that way!). Time will tell, and I’ll wait and see.

Personally, I’m sticking with SimplyMEPIS 7 for now.