No. I just "flattened" my music collection from "vinyl rips", "cd rips", "purchases", etc. to a simple artist/album hierarchy -- now Audacious is working okay for me. I do love the simplicity and the near-instantaneous startup. But I find I'm not listening to music I've "forgotten about" any more as it's not as visible as with a constantly displayed library. So I suspect I'll be keeping Clementine around, too.

KDE does have a lot of options I don't need or that don't quite satisfy. But it also has more of those I do need (or want) than any other desktop I've tried...

There were PPC expansion boards, at least for the A1200 and A4000.

No, Commodore didn't (and most of their Amigas were infuriatingly low-specced), but there were expansion boards both with 680x0 and PPC CPUs. Here's one for the Amiga 1200: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=154

PowerPC... if I'm not completely confused, even the classic Commodore Amigas could be souped up with those (OS 3.x/AGA generation, anyway?)

my biggest complaint is that they took away the desktop icons.

? Mine are still there. Open the desktop settings and switch it to "Folder View" and/or add one or more Folder View widgets yourself. You can also drag application icons from the launcher to the desktop.

There's a Search Visibility option on the profile editor. "Unchecking this box will prevent your profile from being indexed by most search engines."

Doesn't GNOME Shell use its own compositor (Mutter) instead of Compiz? It might be required to run.

Me too; funnily enough, I've set it up rather like Unity with a vertical hybrid task-manager-with-launchers. Being KDE, though, it's easily malleable to new whims and needs. Plasma is a bit of a assemble-your-own-desktop kit. And I love Kmail and Knode, Kate, K3b, and Dolphin. It looked like a gutted toy version of Konqueror at first, but it can easily be set up as an informative but uncluttered and elegant file manager.

But I did disable Nepomuk/Strigi and the fairly puzzling aggregating notification system. Seriously, I could barely tell what was going on with that thing...

I believe Ubuntu 11.10 will be based on Gnome 3, just with Unity again instead of Gnome Shell. From what I've heard, Gnome Shell will nonetheless be available in the repositories. And you can quite easily try Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell now as they're available through this or that PPA. (I'm a nigh-fulltime KDE user, and my experience with Gnome Shell was brief, but I certainly preferred it to Unity... which I found quite bewildering.)

No problem! Try the Plasma Netbook interface!

I had an A1200, but there were plenty RGB video monitors that worked fine for the traditional PAL and NTSC screenmodes, and the Acorn multisync/mutliscan monitor I had worked fine for those as well as for some of the higher-resolution AGA chipset modes. (Standard PC-type monitors worked fine for some screenmodes, with a scandoubler/flickerfixer between the RGB port and the monitor's VGA plug, but not necessarily for old schooly games.) I don't imagine the A600 had a different monitor port even if it didn't have all of the A1200's graphics modes.

Hm, I see a lot of complaints about sound not working in this or that (say Skype or Flash) on forums. I've had hardware mixing for most of my Linux life, even with my onboard sound, so I'm not sure how tricky it gets when you *have* to rely on dmix or a sound server like Pulse. I do recall fiddling with dmix slaves (successfully, but I would rather not repeat it). I sometimes run JACK for some audio production apps and I suppose it's best with a hardware channel unto itself.

Would you mind telling me what brand/model your laptop is? I've still got a desktop soundcard with 32 channel hardware mixing (so ALSA-only isn't a problem) but I've been worrying about having to use Pulseaudio one day/in a laptop.

There're still many versions of Legend of the Green Dragon on the WWW...