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.

Paul Wheator, permaculture guy and cteater of both http://www.richsoil.com and http://www.permies.com recently released a podcast that has nothing to do with Permaculture. Most permies will probably have little interest but it was very interesting to me. It was about finding a new tool to use in his work. Not a shovel or tractor but a laptop computer.

If you want to hear the podcast, it is at http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/244-podcast-024-returned-mac-got-pc... . While the podcast stands on its own, I have some observations and comments.

I just got a Nokia N900, smuggled into Nicaragua by a friend. I have had it for less than half a day but I want to toss out my first impressions. Wow!

My wife has a 770 and I had an 800 until it disappeared. I want to say stolen but I can't figure out how so disappeared is better. Both were impressive. They are well-built and do what they say they are supposed to do. But, the N900 is a whole new ballgame.

It is the first to be a regular phone as well as a Linux-based computer with WiFi. If you just want a phone, it is too big and has too short a battery life.

When I wrote about beta 1 I was pretty positive. That is, 10.04 looked good, some things that were problems for me in 9.04 or 9.10 were fixed and while there were some rough edges, things seemed to almost be there.

Well, beta 2 broke some things and now, at RC, more things are broken. The strangest is that my printer was detected on beta 1 automatically. The printer no longer works. I went back to an older system and it didn't work either. I was about to think the printer died but, as a final test, I booted up the 10.04 beta 1 CD on another laptop and the printer works just fine.

Just in case you are a Linux geek and thinking about Kubuntu or Ubuntu 10.04, I figured I would toss this out. I have a combination of (mostly) 9.04 and 9.10 running on my systems but needed to set up a new system for someone and decided to try the 10.04 beta. This is my very preliminary look.