Today heralds the latest release of Ubuntu! Included, according to Slashdot, is a LiveUSB option.

I'll give it a try a little later.

edit:
more info from the ubuntu forums.

I've been running Ubuntu 8.10 (the latest) here all week (well, the final Release Candidate, more or less identical).

On the whole, I like it very much. The 3D desktop itegration is simply amazing, and parts of it are actually quite useful -- eg. the desktop zoom function is handy for youtube videos and for Chris's photography website, as otherwise images look tiny on my 1920x1200 notebook screen!

The networking "just works" perfectly. And, a first for Canon, I plugged in my Pixma 8500 photo printer, and was greated by a simple little bubble stating that it had been detected and configured.. sure enough, it "just worked" without any interaction or driver discs. Way cool -- Canon printers have hardly ever been supported before now.

Kubuntu-8.10 ships with slower-than-winter KDE4 as the only "choice". Problem is, KDE4 is *not* KDE -- it's some newfangled desktop system that shares the same first three characters ('K', 'D', 'E'). The similarity and usability ends there.

As does my affinity for Kubuntu. Real KDE ("KDE3") is no longer offered even as an option, so now I'm learning GNOME and gconf-editor in particular. With the latter, the desktop can be made somewhat usable, though it does still lack nice essentials like toggle keys for maximize vertical/horizontal.

But I cannot live/work with GNOME's poor excuse for a terminal app, so I've grabbed Konsole from KDE3 (Kubuntu Hardy) and use it for all of my text windows on GNOME.

I think I'll survive the demise of KDE, and the new Compiz-Fusion eye candy tricks are great time-consumers.

Ubuntu-8.10 is going onto both of my notebooks, and its sweet young sister, Xubuntu, is going to end up on the PVR with Mythbuntu running on top of it.

Cheers

I still use xterm. I find it superior to all of the other terminal apps. The only place it could use some work, IMO, is in its memory usage, and none of the other apps I've seen are any better.

"Problem is, KDE4 is *not* KDE -- it's some newfangled desktop system that shares the same first three characters ('K', 'D', 'E'). The similarity and usability ends there."

Yes, what a bummer this is. I've stopped at Fedora 8 to retain KDE 3.5.

I really, really hate GNOME, but KDE will have to pull off a miracle to produce an alternative in time for 3 or 4 people to still care. Yes, it seems like after a lot of initial screams of horror over KDE4, I can't find much shouting out there. I fear that's because folks are just voting with their feet.

KDE 4.2 supposedly in January 2009. Supposed some new things called "features". No problem to stand pat until January 2010 if I had to, but I am not optimistic. Dang I hate GNOME

What's wrong with KDE4? Rather, what's more wrong with it than with KDE3? (Not that Gnome isn't worse.)

Slow, (VERY slow), incomprehensible menu system, broken shortcut keys in Konsole (possibly others as well), dog ugly themes, no "kicker", etc..

And mostly, it's not KDE. If I'm gonna learn a new desktop, then it might as well be GNOME.

On the plus side, XFCE is looking a lot like KDE from, oh, about 7 years ago. That's a *good* thing.

Cheers

Right, I installed KDE4, and not only did it not carry forward my HTTP proxy setting from KDE3, it plain didn't support HTTP proxying -- so, no web in Konqueror. I uninstalled it again and went back to KDE3, and the shouting stopped. I don't expect to start shouting again until I reinstall it, which, unless I hear very good things about it, won't be until after they mothball KDE3. (And this is coming from someone who's usually so keen on the bleeding-edge that I download new point releases of GCC the day they come out and recompile the whole of userland against them.)

Peter

Aside from slowness mark mentions and some impenetrable (to me) new desktop metaphors (like no desktop) they just decided not to carry over "old" things like an auto-hiding task bar and tons of other familiar KDE elements. I used to be able to set my background to a "update-every-5-minute" webcam grab. Gone now. or I can't find it.

The explanations seem to vary from "You don't need those things anymore!" to "this is a development release!" to "You don't need those things anymore!" to "Maybe we'll have some of those things in 4.2."

So I have set up Fedora 9 in a virtual machine, turned on rawhide, and I run yum update every few weeks to see if I detect any KDE4 miracle.

I find it very interesting to read this. I too am currently taking my first steps with Linux, and for this I'm using Suse 11 with KDE 4. I liked what I saw (for one reason or the other, I absolutely hate Gnome, and I can't stand that orangy-brown theme in Ubuntu), but now it seems KDE 4 is not even 'the real thing'.

In other words: it's intriguing to hear that KDE 3.5 was even better. Maybe I should install that instead.

I snagged a copy of the KDE4 remix of 8.04 shortly after it was released and I was frankly horrified by what I saw. It didn't even seem as though they'd got a quarter of the way towards replicating the functionality of KDE3.

Given that 8.04 is an LTS release it'll be around for a least as long as 8.10, I'm hoping by that point KDE4 will have 'matured' by then.

I've not actually turned my home desktop machine on in months as I do pretty much everything on my MacBook Pro. But I'm hoping work will stump up the readies for an octal core Xeon powered Dell Precision as my office machine in which case I will probably make the move to Linux at work. I'll probably stick with 8.04 as the host OS and then try KDE4 in VMware alongside a few Windows guests.