Intrepid?? KDE4 is causing a ruckus, how is Gnome with the new system?

[Paul S]

I've tried an upgraded intrepid kubuntu on another partition and am 
having problems with slow application startup time, poor fonts in 
firefox and t'bird, slowness (unusable) in google-earth, broken 
hibernate, and many keyboard functions (i.e. eject, battery monitor, 
suspend, hibernate) don't work.  Maybe this is all because I did an 
upgrade, instead of a fresh install, so I'll give it another try after 
it comes out final.  For now, I'm staying with hardy and kde 3.5.10 on 
my productivity partition where everything is working well.

regards,