I have used many Linux distro’s and windows managers over the years, but for the last few years I decided to settle on Ubuntu, mainly because of the ease of installing software (apt-get) and it working with the laptops I had at the time – I tried many different distro’s on these laptops, Ubuntu was the only one that got most of the things working out of the box, built-in web cam for example.

So, I installed 10.04, quite happy with it, went to 10.10, still happy, 11.04 yep still happy (I opted to use the “Classic” GNOME  interface), then in moment of madness (okay I was jet lagged from a recent trip to the UK) I upgraded my desktop machine to 11.10, being fully aware of all the crap over Unity and how bad it was, anyway, I did not like Unity one little bit, for all the reasons other people have already mentioned out there, it was then that I discovered that you cannot use GNOME classic with 11.10,  well there is a version of  the older version of GNOME, but it is crippled, I tried to get use to using Unity but just wasn’t happening, so I decided to try GNOME 3, seeing as that is the direction all things GNOME based are heading.

I certainly preferred GNOME 3 to Unity, but it was buggy, I’m not going to go into great detail over the issues I had with it or Unity, suffice to say I needed a way out of this, so I decided to give KDE4.7 a try, I had previously used KDE for many years and it was only when I went the “the way of the Ubuntu” (and got lazy) that I swapped to GNOME, I was also aware of the some the issue of early versions of KDE4.x so that influenced me some what.

Anyway, I wanted the ease of use of apt-get plus KDE, so Kubuntu to the rescue!

So, simples…

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

That’s it! Well almost, there are a few things that did not work out of the box.

Problem – the fonts looked really crap for some reason, I mean really poor, especially in Firefox

Fix – backup your old fonts.conf file mv .fonts.conf  .fonts.conf.old, then sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig, log off and and on, and enjoy font loveliness.

Problem – I was trying to add a printer, and also applying the latest updates and had a permissions issue, usually when making changes you get the “requires root” (sudo) dialog, I was not getting this dialog so thought this the most likely culprit, sure enough a bug had been reported at https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/819266, easily fixed.

Fix – sudo apt-get intsall polkit-kde-1