Comment 19 for bug 570151

As promised, an update:

For the first time in months, I was able to get through a full week without a single crash. Unfortunately, the week was instead plagued with slower response times (whereas GNOME's response to things like swapping windows would take <1ms, KDE would sometimes take as long as ~3s to redraw, focus, and control). It's also overloaded, by default, with so much "eye candy" that bogs the system down. Trimming out what I consider useless - as a developer who spends time in a formula CLI > GUI - improved the experience a bit, but it still has some work needed to get it where I want it. This week was minimal in that regard, as I wanted to give a good, full account on a setup as close to the apt-get default install as possible. So, just to close with a quick summary of pros vs. cons:

PROS:
    * No crashes or freezes during seven-day test window --- improvement from >=1 crash per 24 hours.
    * Very, very easy to install, thanks to apt.
    * Easy enough to switch back to GNOME at will.
    * NO CRASHES, NO LOSS OF WORK! WOO-HOO!!!!

CONS:
    * Bloated, heavy, slow, and a bit juvenile in appearance.
        (NOTE: Until switching to Ubuntu from Mandriva, I had always preferred KDE.)
    * Relatively slow response times to input from control devices.
    * Need to re-familiarize myself with keystroke combinations in KDE vs. GNOME.
    * Not a fan of the new menus and navigation structure.
    * Too much "eye candy" for my personal preference.
    * Memory utilization notably higher in KDE, even during extended idle periods.
    * A few times, applications drawing to center screen left a "whiteboard" - where you drag other windows over and it leaves their foreground on top of the screen on the "whiteboard" area - until the processes were killed or died.
    * For whatever reason, ~/Desktop doesn't display on the GUI desktop as icons.
    * Window and widget edge detection doesn't always seem to calculate properly with relation to the physical aspect and available space of the screen.
    * Window swapping would sometimes cause a window not selected to gain focus.
    * Clicking borders of some windows to try to gain focus caused them to minimize to the center. (Perhaps a "feature"?)

That's about it for now. In a bit of a rush to get out to finish some high-priority stuff before the US holiday weekend here, so my apologies if these notes appear a little skewed. Any questions you have about my experience, send them to (danbrown AT php DOT net) and I'll try to answer them.