I recently installed kubuntu 8.10 onto my laptop, I did have ubuntu running with the GNOME desktop however there was a new KDE desktop available KDE 4.1.3 (I think) and I have to say I did like the look of it to a certain extent. I liked the 3D cylinder affect that you get when you change from one desktop to another. with ubuntu GNOME and KDE 3 you got a cube effect which is pretty cool but the cylinder just finished it off.
The build I found so far hasn't been the most stable of operating systems but I do not know if that is because of the build or because of the end user (me) as I am very new to Linux.
When I first tried the to install the desktop effects known as compiz I hadn't configured my graphics card properly and it just crashed the system each time and I ended up re-installing it! It turns out that these effects only really work on certain makes of graphic cards. in my laptop I have an Nvidia card and it works (once you got the driver installed) and on the desktop I tried it on I had an ATI card in it.
I haven't tried it on a PC/Laptop with an integrated Intel card yet but I guess that will be something I will try soon.
The install of kubuntu is very very straight forward it can be done from a live cd that you can download here
The installation might be simple but then getting apps installed is another question! I finally have learnt the basic commands such as sudo apt-get install etc.... and I have learnt how to update the system.
a lot of applications are jsut a simple command line install such as Thunderbird and Mozilla:
sudo apt-get install thunderbird and sudo apt-get install firefox
however I found in order to run these I needed to run a sudo apt-get update to download a list of packages available to install. Once you have that you can also run the sudo apt-get upgrade command and that will update the system from the downloaded updates.
As much as I do like this desktop I think that KDE 3 does run a bit more smoothly than KDE 4 and the menu's on KDE 3 are a bit more friendly I think.
But I have to say I am enjoying playing around with it.
I have also managed to get connected to my companies VPN using the Cisco client.
Watch out for some more posts on it soon :)