I've after many years just given up on SUSE 11.1 -- SUSE was excellent until Novell tried to make it more "Windows" than Windows. Now it's a dog with a hard to use package manager (have to hunt around for everything until you can find the correct repository) and trying to get simple things like Multi-media to work properly (in 2009 where every computer on the planet now has multi-media enabled) seems to be worse now than a few years back.

I finally said enough was enough and started with UBUNTU.

I did my very IST install of UBUNTU today and can't believe EVERYTHING worked "Straight out of the box" I added a load of Hard to find packages (on SUSE) such as a 3270 enulator (for mainframe access) and a number of others -- synaptic just went and found them --great stuff -- Package Manager in SUSE has been seriously broken for some time.

However (and there's always a BUT isn't there) -- I really DO prefer the KDE desktop.

Is it worth installing the KDE desktop on top of UBUNTU (that way I'd get a choice if a particular app needs one desktop or the other) or should I go back and install KUBUNTU from the start.

Disk space is not a problem -- I've OODLES and the system is a QUAD
Q9400 16GB ASUS motherboard.

So far the KDE on top of UBUNTU seems to work fine and I've got all the "Missing" KDE apps (271 packages downloaded and installed).

So far liking the distro a lot --wish I'd tried it earlier.

I'll see what happens in a week or so after I've actually been USING it for real work.

The advantage in the KUBUNTU installation is that the system would probably be leaner and cleaner but Disk space is not an issue for me.

Cheers
-K

In principle, it should make little difference. In practice, I would guess that the 'buntu folks would do some configuring on KDE as part of the Kubuntu package.

Personally, I prefer to install Ubuntu, then install the Kubuntu Desktop. I use a lot of apps for both Gnome and KDE, but prefer the KDE desktop. Installing Gnome apps on KDE (or vice-versa) loads a lot of support libraries for the respective DM, so the drive space hit between the two options is actually quite minimal, and performance is the same.

Cheers

You could just reomove any,or all, of gnome from your K/Ubuntu setup using apt-get or synaptic. Or you can keep it all if you want. The KDE and QT stuff should not interfere with gnome at all.

In the future, if all you want is KDE and KDE programs without Gnome or Gnome programs, then I would just install Kubuntu. It is the same OS. The only difference is the desktop enviornment.

If you anyway prefer KDE I'd install Kubuntu.
Then, when you need Gnome-/GTK-programs, and you surely will, simply install those and your package-manager will pull all that's necessary.

Yes, best way I've found is to start with Ubuntu and then add KDE.

I've tried it direct from the Kubuntu install disc, and found there was some important stuff missing that would have been there if I'd gone with a stock Ubuntu and then installed KDE.

One thing though -- Ubuntu have put a lot more effort into their Gnome interface than KDE. Don't get me wrong, I like Kubuntu a lot, and use it myself as my preferred distro, but from a user perspective, it isn't as slick as regular Ubuntu -- when I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, I found the K menu was a bit of a mess, with Gnome and KDE config apps scattered all over the place.

Also -- what version of KDE are you looking for? Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy") allows you to choose either KDE 3.5 or 4, but if you install 8.10 ("Intrepid"), you'll be forced to use KDE 4. Personally, I'm waiting for 9.04 ("Jaunty") to be released so I can try out KDE 4.2, but I'm not willing to use an earlier version of KDE 4 than that, so I haven't upgraded from Hardy yet.

just install the kubuntu-desktop metatpakage, form the pakagemanager of your choice

that will give you the whole of Kubuntu without loosing the gnome stuff