I recently switched from XP to Ubuntu in the office.

At home I use Ubuntu’s default GNOME configuration, but I was worried by the lack of decent mail notification from Evolution and decided that if KDE’s priority was features over simplicity, it would better suit my workday needs.

I had heard mostly good things about Kubuntu - though, in retrospect, mostly from their own web site - and decided to install it as soon as I had shrunk my XP partition. It does install as easily as Ubuntu, and it does have a friggin’ mail notification linked to an e-mail program, and nice form controls in its default browser (Konqueror). Those are all of the good things I have to say about KDE.

The bad, which outweighs the good here by about 5 tons, is that the damn thing crashes all the time. At first I thought maybe I had done something wrong, set something incorrectly. But surely I hadn’t separately messed up Konqueror, Kontact, and amaroK, all three of which crashed several times a day. I can be reckless with computers, but my luck isn’t that bad.

So I switched back to GNOME, which is not hard to do with (K)ubuntu. My work day is so much less stressful now, I wonder if GNOME isn’t secretly feeding me valium through my fingertips. Probably, though, it’s just the pleasure of using something that doesn’t crash too much and doesn’t overwhelm me with a gazillion useless configuration parameters and bizarre defaults.

(Not sure why I ever though KDE would work for me, since their model is Windows X-P-3000-whiz-bang, and GNOME’s is Mac System 7.)

I followed these instructions to make Firefox’s forms a little easier on the eyes, and I’m trying not to let it bother me that two programs are separately querying my IMAP sever. Beats crashing, anyway.