So like Boud, I recently was forced to make an exodus from my long-time Kubuntu installation.
I moved to Kubuntu after I found out that my brand new chipset was too new to be supported by my favourite Unix(tm), FreeBSD, in either 32 or 64 bit mode simply due to lack of SATA drivers for the new mobo. Well! that is a bit of a predicament that I needed to promptly resolve.
After rambling with a few people on IRC, I ended up trying out Kubuntu - well, it turns out that I had to install the unstable version in order to get a new enough kernel to use my SATA drivers, but it did indeed "just work". The "just work" part of this equation is why I chose Kubuntu in the first place, and why I've stuck with it for as long as I did.
This Kubuntu version was Hoary Hedgehog, one of the first full Kubuntu releases (if not the first one), which shipped with a pretty virgin KDE, and a reasonable set of customizations that one comes to expect from a distro. Since then, I've been upgrading my Kubuntu install each time there's been a release, only moving to the unstable stuff if there was something that was not being added to the stable release which was needed for KDE 4 building or similar. I've had the occasional problem with the upgrades, but nothing too serious.
Now yesterday I decided that in order to get some of the KDE 4 build deps up to date, I would go through the Feisty->Gutsy update using the official instructions posted on their website (which I conveniently found via the /topic in #kubuntu). The actual upgrade process seemed to go smoothly, and it removed some old packages and programs that I never used anyway. All is well until I reboot.
Well, after the system came back up, I discover that there is some really slick artwork for the new KDM theme. Simply fresh and beautiful! But as KDE is loading, the screen starts to flicker wildly. Redrawing problems I presume: maybe it's the wrong X drivers or something. So I'm poking around, and discover that yes, it is indeed using the nvidia drivers as it should be - the same version that was working fine for me in the previous release, from their 'unsupported but official' packages. Okay, so why is everything so slow? It takes two seconds to redraw the screen when switching windows or tabs withing programs -- this needs to be fixed. So I start poking around, log onto IRC to get some help and BOOM! Hard halt requiring forced reset! Well, perhaps it's the nvidia drivers, so I switch down to vesa drivers when I reboot in order to eliminate that problem. This time I can't even get a web browser open before the hard system halt. Well, probably a kernel problem then: reboot and choose the kernel from the old install - well, it doesn't even let me boot into X with that kernel, but at this point I'm mad and have stopped caring about fixing it!
You see, I happen to strongly disagree with some of the decisions that Riddell is taking with Kubuntu with regard to changing programs and so forth (even though I love Riddell himself), so combine that with an upgrade that is blowing up on me -- well, I guess that's a clear signal that it's time to move on.
So thankfully for me, I've been playing around with other distributions on a second hard disk for a while in order to keep myself aware of what's happening around the world of KDE shipping distros. In the last several months I've played with PC-BSD, GoboLinux, Mandriva, and a few others. I consider this part of my job within KDE, not just for writing purposes, but also to keep an eye on what the distros are doing to KDE these days.
So now I need to send a call down to the bull-pen for a new pitcher, and I decide to give Mandriva the call. I just happened to have a working install of PC-BSD on that second disk (which has it's own, much smaller problems) which I used to download the latest Mandriva (2008.0) install disk. PC-BSD did its job by allowing me to download the Mandriva ISO, burn it with k3b, compare MD5's to ensure that the disk was a perfect burn, and bask in my former FreeBSD roots for a short while. This was the drive I was going to overwrite with Mandriva, so for the time being, PC-BSD got the hook.
The Mandriva installation went smoothly and, with the exception of the annoying registration/survey portion on first boot, couldn't be much better. (Maybe if they let me play tetris while the files were copying... oh wait, it's installing from a live CD so I could have played Tetris!) It automatically installed Flash, the nvidia driver, and a few other odds and ends that Kubuntu refuses to use by default. (As a side note: you are presented with the option of downloading a Mandriva ISO that contains none of this stuff if you object to its inclusion for moral or legal reasons.)
Now, because I'm definitely a KDE power user, I had no problems figuring out how to make Konqueror the default web browser (just change the order of programs in the text/html mimetype). I added a bunch of Mandriva updates repositories using their pretty logical control panel and ran the updates. All of my hardware has been detected and is working, including the same nvidia driver that was borked on Kubuntu. Nothing is broken; everything "just works!" which is exactly why I went to Kubuntu years ago.
Since Kubuntu will not be shipping KDE 4 as the default for some time, but rather shipping half-functional backports of KDE 4 technologies, I expect we'll see more people jumping ship in the next few months too, even if it isn't blowing up: it's a pity really, as it used to be quite decent.
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