Please, it's Firefox _not_ FireFox nor fire fox, thank, you.

I did, after being supportive and forgiving from 4.0 to 4.3beta, I'm tired of KDE4 trying way too hard too reinvent everything, braking usability and killing my productivity.
Maybe after 4.5 it will be mature enough, like 3.5... oh wait

Away From The Keyboard? Unplugged? ;P

I hope you've reported those bugs to bugtracker ;) I've tried KUbuntu but it has tendency to give the worst KDE experience of all. I've switched to openSUSE, works great for me :)

Mod parent up! I'm sick and tired of people whining about "Linux Desktop" (whatever that term means), about it don't innovate enough, about they innovate too much, about fragmentation of "Linux Desktop", about not enough choice (because my feature X that I saw in Y os wasn't implemented) etc.
You know what? Linux and the whole Free/Libre Software is about _choice_ and _freedom_, if someone don't get it, he should just stfu and learn.
And about the "Linux Desktop" (WTF?): gnome and kde are available on: solaris, bsd, osx and there is even windows port of kde (dunno bout gnome), so do the research first if you don't want to look like an idiot.

I fully agree. When I first saw KDE 4.0 alpha, I was thinking "this is developer preview quality" and that's OK, but I saw the potential.
Then was the 4.1x when I started using it on daily basis, there were lots of rough edges, but that was the point, to help them out with at least bug reports and maybe some patches.
And here we are, I'm writing this from KDE 4.3 beta and this is gonna be great release!
And yes people are afraid of change (actually they're mostly afraid of everything), but I don't care that much, I love to drive innovation, even if my involvement is marginal (for now), life on cutting edge is fun!

On core 2 duo 1.7, but it's not the issue here probably. Some graphic cards perform really bad on linux, there were versions of graphics drivers that was buggy and slow, I've had issues with my nvidia chipset cause nvidia don't gave a frakk 'bout quality of their drivers for linux... So yes there was significant (and probably still are on the newer chips) performance issues but they have nothing to do with KDE nor Qt itself. And as I previously said there was significant performance boost from Qt4 itself (you can check troll's benchmarks if you want), so it should be noticeable. Also I've noticed that Kubuntu tends to have more issues (at least 4.2 had) than others, I recommend openSUSE, it have great support for KDE (traditionally).

Yes, I mostly agree, they should IMHO do it like: 4.0 pre-alpha devel preview, 4.1 alpha, 4.2 beta, 4.3 RC. I don't miss any feature of the KDE3, and since 4.2 it's less and less buggy, but remember it's community effort, so the more you give the more you get :) I e.g. always report bugs and try to patch them when I can. Anyway I think this was bold and necessary move to rewrite the codebase and we all will see effects soon in 4.3 and 4.4, cause now KDE4 is beginning to show it's potential, after all the major deep-in-the-libraries work has been done :D btw I use 4.3beta2 and it's frakkin' great ;)

KDE4 is ~30% faster than KDE3, mainly because of the Qt4 vs. Qt3 improvements and vast redesign of the KDE itself...

Sun SPARC anyone? http://www.sun.com/processors/opensparc/

Consider teaching both. I'm a student and I've used VHDL in first semester and Verilog in second (a project). I've found very good book for students/beginners and it was fun to learn it with it, the book was Digital design and computer architecture By David Money Harris, Sarah L. Harris. http://books.google.com/books?id=5X7JV5-n0FIC&dq=digital+design+and+computer+architecture+solutions&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=T-EjSqP3NoWNjAe53b2rBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4