I'm going to put Linux on my mom's old Dell Inspiron (2.5 G processor, 2 G RAM) in the next couple of months. I want to give her something with KDE 4.2 since she likes the weather, calendar, and clock widgets. Are there any stability problems to be concerned about after installing 4.2 on openSUSE 11.1 via one click install or should I just go with Kubuntu 9.04?

I really would not do this. In my opinion, KDE is not yet stable enough for other than techie users who like being on the bleeding edge and who are prepared to put up with a certain amount of messing about to get there.

I still have hopes for 4.3 being a good end-user release, but, so far, every relese of kde 4.x has been less ready than I have expected, so I may have a track record of being terminally optimistic, who can say?

And are there any of these that you can't get on KDE 3.5? Doesn't look as dramatic, and there will be a new learning curve when you do eventually transition to kde 4.x.

If you have decided to go for KDE 4 on a current distro, and bearing in mind that this is not the decision that I would take, I think I would prefer SuSE. I haven't tried exactly these two variants, but historically SuSE has done a good job with KDE where Ubuntu more hasn't.

KDE on SuSE gets a few of their own enhancements and is generally taken seriously (I'm writing this on their KDE 4.1.4 with backports from KDE 4.2 and subsequent bugfixes, and I'm generally finding it tolerable, but I know that there is only a limited amount of time before something better comes out).

The versions of kubuntu that I have tried always feel a bit like poor relations when it comes to the care and effort that the Ubuntu team takes with them, relative to what they do with Gnome.

I have installed things via '1 click' versus the 'traditional' yast way, and haven't had problems with it (assuming that you can be clear about exactly which package you want to install). You should still be able use the yast way, provided that you have the correct repos set up (err, and, 1 click sets up the repos, if you let it), although I've got the situation where I've got more than half a dozen GUIs set up (and that would only be three or four if I was really happy with KDE 4) and the chooser doesn't work reliably. I don't know what has caused that.

Hi Matthew

I'm running openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2.2 on a Dell XPS M1530. I've been using KDE 4 ever since 4.1 without any major problems. Granted, I am a techie user, but my experience has been that KDE 4 has been really solid since 4.2 and with 4.2.3 being released in a few days that should improve a little more.

I can't speak for Kubuntu 9.04 but I did use Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months last year. It wasn't bad but the experience couldn't compare to using the same version of KDE on openSUSE. As salasi mentioned, the openSUSE team backports a lot of the features and bug fixes so it feels more stable and polished.

I have no hesitation in giving openSUSE with KDE 4.2 to my own mother. At the moment she's using eeebuntu on an AspireOne but when I get round to it I plan on installing openSUSE on her other laptop because she loves the look and feel of KDE4.

The only major problem I've had is that KDM doesn't always start (as a techie user there might be minor problems that I don't even notice). I'll admit that that is a pretty serious issue. As far as I can tell it seems to be a combination of KDE 4.2 + openSUSE 11.1 + the nvidia propriety driver. Changing the ServerAttempts and ServerTimeout in /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc seems to fix it though, so that is something to watch out for.

Thanks to both of you for the info and recommendations.

kde 4.2 is superb and completly stable hey even my 70 year old gran uses it but i would recomend kubuntu 9.04 cos 11.1 would work 1 click for me on 11.1
oh just never do sudo dolphin the system crashes

I agree with salasi. Unless your mom has extraordinarily good nerves and doesn't mind her computer being "under maintenance" every now and then when you try to figure out what's going wrong this time, or likes crashing apps more than average users do, don't put KDE 4.x there yet. If the widgets are your only "real" reason for going there, stop and think again: KDE 4 is not the only desktop environment that provides them. For example if you took Gnome and used Compiz Fusion (which you would, if you were after the eye candy of KDE 4.x) , you could just as easily install Screenlets and get the meters, clocks, calendars, weather reports and whatnot, with transparency and so on. Or get the gDesklets, which work without compositing effects too. Or one of the various other alternatives that work in your preferred desktop environment or window manager..widgets are really not a reason to pick up a desktop, especially for a person who probably isn't going to deal with any techinical problems in it.

I'd suggest the latest of KDE 3 series for now if you are a friend of KDE, or if you're open for options, Gnome or XFCE. There's a lot to choose from, but I think your mom's not ready for WindowManager, Fluxbox etc. KDE 4.x will very probably be a good choice in the future, but the versions available now don't really stand out as stable or smoothly usable. Of course you can go with it, but in a bad case it's just time consumption and getting tired of bugs for your mom, so be ready to make another switch in that case. Though if you do insist on going with it, I suggest that you download live-cd distributions (many) and try them out yourself for a few days per item, so that you see how they work out; installing would be even better (some live-cd distributions might not get everything out of your hardware before upgrading drivers and so on, which usually doesn't work on the live-cd), but anyway test them yourself and decide based on that. Choosing a distribution Z with KDE 4.x just because somebody said "that is good" doesn't mean it really works for you.

GDesklets doesn't work on openSUSE 11.1 or Ubuntu 9.04. I think I'll check out Mandriva.