There must be something wrong with your desktop PCs (perhaps they all have nvidia graphics?). KDE4 is much faster than GNOME on PCs with adequate graphics.

By adequate I mean any graphics with a GPU and a decent Linux driver. Open source drivers are best, as they have been benchmarked at a few time faster than closed-source proprieatary binary blob drivers. To get open source drivers you will need either an Intel GPU, and older ATI GPU (R500 or earlier), or any ATI GPU after kernel 2.6.32 is released later this year.

Since Qt 4.6 has just been released with performance improvements, and new Intel drivers with performance improvements have also just been released, and Linux kernel 2.6.32 with performance improvements is at rc8 stage just now, then KDE4 performance on Intel Atom/Intel graphics netbooks will step up another notch again next year when Kubuntu 10.4 (LTS) will be released.

Your Kubuntu netbooks will really fly then.

“KDE4 is much faster than GNOME on PCs with adequate graphics.”

This statement is absurd. That's backed by installing both on dozens of different machines.

Which is goofy because nVidia has the best Linux support of all, yet KDE 4 doesn't work well with it. Go figure…

Hello, I'm writing to you now from an ASUS Eee 1005HA with Kubuntu 9.10 Netbook remix. It works great, save for one thing – there is a bug in the network wireless driver, ath9k. After some time or when coming out of hibernation, the WPA2 wireless connection drops, the signal strength becomes very low. I wrote this little script to remove the driver from the kernel and put it back in. When you run it, the signal strength of your wireless connection is strong again.

haakon@gnuru:~$ cat nettopp.sh
#!/bin/bash
sudo modprobe -r ath9k
sudo modprobe ath9k
haakon@gnuru:~$

I hope you find it useful.

I've added quite a number of screenshots in the Norwegian Free Software group on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=photos&ref=…

I'm particularly pleased with the combination of the genealogy program GRAMPS and the webcam program Cheese. Adding pictures immediately has never been so easy – people sit down before the Eee, smile when they see themselves and you get a nice picture to add to their entry in GRAMPS.

I just had to have one of those new Mandelbulb images, and used a patched version of POV-Ray 3.6 and Kpovmodeler 1.1.3 (image saving doesn't work without the patch) to produce this 3D fractal on the Eee. A 4000×4000 image took 27 1/2 hours, but since most software does not use the processor, I could still do other work.

Cheers,
Haakon

Hmm…this KDE is different from the normal desktop one. I it just the KDE 4? Or is it what I'm looking for–designed for netbooks?

I’ll go further – DON’T judge KDE on the basis of Kubuntu, the latter is broken for a long time.