I installed 8.10 with KDE4 last week on a IBM T43 laptop and it went quite smoothly. I was impressed with how easy it went through and that all the hardware except for the wireless card worked out of the of the box. The wireless card setup even though not 100% automated was still quite easy. The driver is a restricted driver and required approval before being used. I saw the warning icon on the taskbar right away and enabled the driver which let me connect to my wireless network.

From what I can see the application set is quite the same as with previous Kubuntu releases. New versions of a lot of them mind you but I didn’t see anything that popped out as a flashy change, except for KDE itself. I am sure there are some meaningful updates in the application suite but I was really looking for something that caught my eye right away. So the people making KDE have made some really nice changes to the menu and desktop. The integration of widgets is nice on the desktop. It actually makes your desktop space for icons another widget so you can arrange it and other widgets around the way you like. Then they are all active if you look at the desktop.

The overall look is nice as well. I mentioned that the programs (or start for all the MS people) menu has been changed. The navigation takes a little getting used to but it’s still quite intuitive. It is actually much better than the Vista menu in my opinion.

I recommend everyone take a look at a Linux distro with KDE4 integrated. You will most likely be surprised at how it looks and how easy it is to navigate. The easiest way to do that for free is by using VirtualBox and creating a virtual computer under Windows so you don’t have to change your current Windows config.

Have fun and happy Kubuntu :)