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Summarizing two odd years of experience with Kubuntu

I have been using Kubuntu for over two years on several workstations including desktops and notebooks of various configurations running on four to eight years old hardware. My experience with Kubuntu has been great. It was and is easy and quick to install and configure. As it is Debian-based and I have been using Debian since the very early days of that distribution I consider Kubuntu and many other contemporary distributions an outstanding achievement. It is, however, with concern that modern Linux distributions face the same systemic problems any other PC based OS and application collection struggles with. The shear breadth of standards, pseudo standards and proprietary hardware and software systems providese severe challanges to the development of high quality software. Unfortunately this is also manifested in certain components of Kubuntu.

Although I use, what I consider hardware of the masses rather than top notch bleeding edge super fast equipment, for years I have been experiencing a number of issues that to this date (over two years) I have no solution for. These problems include that:

1) I have never been able to connect my Toshiba Satellite 5200 notebook with Atheros wireless card to connect to a WPA access point (AP) regardless of whether the AP is hidden or not (although it does under WEP). 2) another Toshiba notebook with Intel wireless card does connect under WPA but the connection is unrealiable and useless. 3) various applications on a number of my workstations including one notebook as well as two desktops sometimes play, sometimes do not play sound and that the ability to play sound sometimes gets lost while upgrading certain software packages during regular maintenance.

I have religiously followed the bug database and user forums and the suggested remedies without success so far. I am still holding on to Kubuntu and Linux in general although, for me, 1) and 2) above render using Kubuntu on (my) notebooks essentially useless and 3) makes using Kubuntu for my multimedia requirements extremely annoying.

As I said I do believe to use nothing fancy but standard hardware and the amount of bug reports and related discussions in respective bug databases, fori, blogs and other resources across internet shows me that there are lots of others with the same (and other problems) out there. From these numbers I gather that this is only the tip of the iceberg and I wonder how many more people, perhaps have tried and have turned away, or have heard about Kubuntu (or others) and considered other options instead.

Usability, or lack thereof, would be another important aspect of present day open as well as closed software systems

I consider Kubuntu to be among the top three linux based software systems for the enthusiastic "open software"-based systems home user. If you were to ask me where I'd rank Kubuntu relative to other state of the art OSs and the applications available for these I'd unfurtunately have to rank it not before MS Windows and certainly not before MAC OS.

Believe me there is still a long ways to go and I realize software systems development is not a piece of cake and I appreciate the achievements of the community.