well
my netbook is very usable with kde 4.8.0 (alienbob packages)

silly me, i didn't remember how laptop-mode works so, after a couple of minutes reading webpages I recompiled it using 13.37 slackbuild and it is there running. Battery life has improved like 15% according to my lame calculations (50% bat with 2 hours 10 min available)

The main reason why i updated everything was to install kde 4.8 as i read somewhere it has an adaptive power management build in somehow. I was very happy with my kde 4.4x or whatever came with 13.37 stable; however, it pissed me off that bat life was up to 7.5 hours on windows using super hybrid engine (asus propietary cpu underclocking management).

performance wise it feels the same... (netbook after all) however, some people have been saying that kde 4.8.0 is fast; maybe i'll have to benchmark or something, but for normal user computing... not perceivable.

Eye candy wise... just beautiful.