First, the good news. Kubuntu 11.10, Alpha 2 looks good. It is already much better than Kubuntu 11.04. My best advice is that if you haven't upgraded to 11.04, don't.

I have been using KDE for well over 10 years. I am pretty happy with it. I have tried Gnome a few times but always return to KDE. Gnome's sometimes you double click policy is what usually gets me. But, today, I have one system running Ubuntu 11.04 because of a nasty bug that makes KDE die during startup. Yes, I reported it during the beta and it got fixed but returned on a different system.

Then we have another feature—call it audio used to work. I loaded 11.04 on a ThinkPad T42. Worked fine. Then, a few upgrades later, audio stopped working. Unfortunately I had done a bunch of upgrades before rebooting so I am not sure what broke it. Yes, I reported it. It is now agreed that some upgrade broke it.

I am writing this while using 11.10 alpha 2 on a T43. Works fine. Audio works. While 11.04 died on the new server I set up (KDE startup bug), 11.04 alpha 2 works fine.

No worries. October will be here soon.