It has been about a week since I installed Kubuntu 6.06.1 (as documented here), and it has gone pretty well so far, with just a few snags.

One snag was the newly infamous xorg bug that rendered X11 useless on my machine. I still have not upgraded to the newest xorg for fear that it may make X11 unusable again.

A second snag occurred when using KDE's runlevel editor (Control Center -> System Administration -> System Services). It screwed my system up so badly I ended up rebuilding it instead of trying to figure out what it did. Something is a little non-standard about Ubuntu's (and Debian's) runlevel scheme, and doesn't seem to play nicely with the KDE tool.

I updated my installation guide a little bit, to change the default Java installation to use 1.4 instead of sun-java-5. Firefox seemed to lock up frequently on Java sites, so I'm downgrading to 1.4 to see if it is more stable.

So ... a few more snags that I'd have hoped for (I didn't expect to have to rebuild the machine so soon ...), but a positive experience so far. Still enjoying the near-perfect multimedia experience; it is working better than any Linux distro I've ever used in that regard.

By the way, my box-rebuilding was much less painless that it could have been, due to having separate partitions for "/" and "/home". Highly recommended! Just remember to tell the Kubuntu installer not to reformat your /home partition when reinstalling (FYI, my fairly "loaded" Kubuntu box is currently using 3Gb on the root partition, just to give you a ballpark estimate of the space required.)

UPDATE (8/24): Just upgraded xserver-xorg-core and it works fine, even with NVIDIA drivers. Make sure you get at least version 1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4

I seem to be able to go 3-4 years with a Linux distribution before I get bored of it and switch to something else. I've been running Gentoo for a couple of years now, but I'm getting that "time to change distributions" feeling again, so I thought I'd write up how it goes. What follows is the results of about 3 weeks of installing, testing, installing, testing, etc., recent Linux distributions to try and find a compelling replacement for my current Gentoo desktop.

Instead of trying all 3000 distributions, I decided to start with the (supposed) best-of-breed, unscientifically chosen by looking at the current Top 3 on Distrowatch. As of today, those are: Ubuntu 6.06 (I used Kubuntu ), openSUSE 10.1 , and Fedora Core 5 .

I'm going into this expecting a lot: It was OK to have to do a lot of manual configuration with Gentoo, since that was the whole idea. However, I expect these "Top 3" distributions to do all the work for me. I expect them to be as point-and-click easy as possible, and will note anything that strays from that expectation.

The story begins here: Moving from Gentoo to SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora Core?