Is Kubuntu 9.10 unusable?

[Borden Rhodes]

It's been a while since I've posted because I reverted back to Debian (Lenny) 
a while ago.  I simply found Kubuntu too buggy with KDE 4 and Ubuntu too 
irritating to control with GNOME.

I burnt a Karmic live CD to give it a try and I'm curious what other people 
think.  I didn't get too far using it but I'm curious if other people have 
had similar experiences or if it's been such a joy to use as I've been 
reading in reviews.

Specifically, I had my Fujitsu Stylistic 5020D tablet docked at its station.  
The dock has given me no shortage of trouble both in Linux and Windows XP 
(for which the tablet was 'designed') and that may explain some of the 
problems.  I wasn't able to verify the CD integrity or boot into Kubuntu 
without checking the `acpi=off` boot option.  If I leave ACPI on, I only get 
a black screen and no activity.

I gave Kubuntu the benefit of a doubt by verifying the CD integrity.  It was 
hard to track the progress of the check because the status bar kept 
flickering.  I don't know if this is a new feature along with the Kubuntu 
logo fading in and out but I suspect it isn't.  Anyway, the CD passed 
inspection so onto the desktop!

Okay, so Kubuntu loads into the KDE desktop and as soon as I see the lovely, 
sleek-looking desktop the screen goes black and the KDE desktop reloads 
again.  Strange.  I try the CTRL+ALT+F# key switch to get into a terminal but 
none of them seem to be working (that is, I can only see a black screen).  
Oh, wait, I just heard the KDE start up jingle.  CTRL+ALT+F8 (don't quote me 
on that, I was doing it by feel) brings be back to the desktop and... no... 
wait, X has restarted.  Huh.

I eventually found that moving my mouse cursor to the the bottom panel as soon 
as I could kept KDE from crashing.  I suspect the problem was with Lancelot 
(is that what it's called?  It's the transparent box where the Install 
Kubuntu icon is) because the loading icon would show just before X restarted.

So, I carefully close that and the KDE(mu)blog Plasmoid and I seem to have a 
stable desktop.  Yay!  Let's check the logs to see what happened.  According 
to the logs, "X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly".  Well, that's 
not a whole lot to help me isolate the problem or file a bug report on.  No 
matter.  Let's see if I can connect to the Internet through PPPoE.

I'm happy to see that DSL has *finally* been integrated into Network Manager 
so I don't have to fiddle around with pppoeconf which never worked alongside 
Network Manager anyway (Network Manager would switch from DSL to local LAN 
and effectively cut me off the Internet in the past).  So, I excitedly type 
in my DSL username and password and go back to the NM icon to connect and... 
wait, there's no DSL option there.  NM only gives me options for local 
Ethernet (which will only get me as far as the router) and wireless networks, 
none of which I have (legal) access to.

Okay, so I guess it's back to pppoeconf for the foreseeable future.  I was 
also happy to see that KBluetooth had been (re)added to KDE 4 but I didn't 
bother to try it out with my Nokia phone.

I did want to see whether my brand-spanking-new, UVC-enabled webcam (Logitech 
3000 Quickcam for Business in case you have one) worked with Kopete since the 
UVC site (and Logitech, for that matter) says it should.  Although I can get 
a picture, it's too dark, too off coloured, and it's covered in blue 
artifacts.  I'm sure I could fiddle around with the brightness, contrast, and 
saturation controls for a while and eventually get something resembling what 
I look like in real life, but there's no way to get rid of the blue static 
all over the picture.  Maybe it's just a Kopete thing.

It's possible that the Intel video drivers are still broken.  I go to reboot 
the machine and instead of getting the usual terminal output telling me about 
closing services and prompting me to eject the CD before I restart I just get 
a black screen with white lines.  It looks like the terminal has compressed 
lines to two pixels high since, knowing what the lines are supposed to say, I 
can kinda see how what does show on my screen resembles what should.

So, I guess I'm back to trusty Lenny running Debian 3.5 at least for another 6 
months.  Yes, I realise that this e-mail is a bit of a disappointed flame 
against K/Ubuntu but I am legitimately curious if anyone else has noticed 
these things or if my tablet is unique in the Linux world.

With regards,

Borden