Having had so much success with the Kubuntu live CD, I thought it was time to try it on a real PC. My laptop was going to be the guinea pig as it had the least to loose if everything went horribly wrong.
The dual boot installation was a piece of cake, and is a credit to the K/ubuntu team. Once I had Kubuntu (7.04 feisty) installed, I wanted to try the TV streaming again in case it was just a virtual machine issue. Unfortunately it wasn't and still I couldn't get it to work. I'll need to keep working at that.
Instead, I installed Thunderbird 2.0 and tested my central mail/calendar locations under Linux. Sadly TB would not run under Kubuntu for me. It wouldn't on the laptop and it wouldn't on the virtual machine either.
To be honest I didn't spend much time trying to find a solution and a google search did not seem to lead to an immediate fix.
Moving on with Kubuntu, I kept having applications crash on me for little reason. I also didn't like the way that Konquerer (the file manager) kept taking over everything including web browsing. I wanted to make Kubuntu look as much like MacOS as possible, including transparency and centering of the icon bar. That's easy to do, but even then I couldn't get it quite how I wanted.
My overall feeling with using KDE is that it's probably great if you already like it, but for me as a Windows user, it was a bit much to get used to in one go.
The crashes continued and although I'm sure that they had something to do with my laptop's graphics card, they were such a pain I decided to move from Kubuntu to Ubuntu as the "perceived reliability" had been higher with that version of the OS.
Sure enough, I've not had any problems with Ubuntu since, and TB installs and runs without issue too. I bet there's a quick fix for Kubuntu, but I only have a certain amount of time to play with it. Thankfully the virtual machine will let me continue with that even if the laptop is now set up with Ubuntu.
Other applications
Generally though, with most applications the experience has been great. I gave OpenOffice a go, successfully opening my Word documents and saving a new document in Office format. For the kind of word processing and spreadsheet work I do at home, OpenOffice is going to be absolutely fine.
With regards TB2 (with my profile stored on the network remember) the mail worked perfectly and only the calendar presented a problem. For some reason Lightning under K/Ubuntu won't let me create a calendar or subscribe to one. This is a bit strange because Sunbird on the same installation works just fine. I'm assuming it must be related to TB 2.0 not being fully available for Ubuntu yet - it does not appear in the official package list at the moment. I'm not too concerned about this because I'm sure it will be fixed and in the meantime I just use Sunbird instead.
I attached to my network shares using Samba, including connecting to my shared printer. No problems there at all.
Playing back Xvid avi's, and recorded MPEG2 PS files from the network was not a problem at all using Totem movie player, and neither were local DVDs.
My music was read and played with the default Rhythmbox player without any issues either. It's nice to have an application there which just does what you tell it and does not have all the extra "flash" of Windows media player. In the end, I want to create a playlist and play it. Searching is easy and not cluttered. Just about perfect.
In conclusion, Ubuntu seems to be a great step forward and at present would be my choice for a new, low cost HTPC.
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