The out of the box experience of Kubuntu can be a little rough edge and quite overwhelming especially to a user who is very new to KDE. It is for this reason that I decided to share some tips and walk around for minor annoyances I encountered using Kubuntu Lucid and generally things I did after installing Kubuntu.

The official derivative of the Ubuntu is Kubuntu. Instead of GNOME, Kubuntu uses KDE graphical environment, and shares its underlying system along with Ubuntu; Kubuntu is a project of Ubuntu.

Have you ever run into an old friend, whom you've not seen in a long time? I experienced this recently with a Kubuntu install. You see, I used to be a heavy KDE user and really loved using it. When Ubuntu become a fairly common household word, I started taking a look at it, but was turned off by Gnome initially. By the time Ubuntu 7.10 rolled out I found myself comfortable with Gnome.

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

Even though Kubuntu shares quite a lot with it’s older sibling, there are obviously enough differences between the two distros that Kubuntu use Ubuntu’s PPA system for a large portion of it’s updates. There are myriad reasons for this, but basically it boils down to these concepts:

I installed Kubuntu and tried it for few days, here are some tips for you if you are planning to instal Kubuntu. Kubuntu is the distant cousin of Ubuntu and uses KDE as its desktop environment.

For my recent review of the latest KDE 4 release candidate, I used an OpenSUSE Live CD image. I've gotten a few e-mails this morning from readers who are looking for an equivalent Live CD based on Kubuntu, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to point out that the Kubuntu KDE 4 RC 2 Live CD was released yesterday. A KDE 4 PPA repository is also available for Kubuntu 7.10 users.

I have previously installed KDE 4.0 RC2 on Kubuntu. It involved adding deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing a few KDE4 based packages. To be true, I was not able to do that using Adept, the Kubuntu package manager. I had to go to command line and then the install went fine.
OpenSUSE, however, changes the entire perspective of installing applications. Their revolutionary 1-Click install performs the job very well here too. All we need to do is to goto KDE4 page on OpenSUSE website and click the install button.

Let's talk about notifications! As Ryan Lortie mentioned, there was a lot of discussion across the Ubuntu, Kubuntu, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla communities represented at UDS about the proposals Canonical's user experience design and desktop experience engineering teams have made for Ubuntu 9.04.