My experience couldn't have been worse. Not only did the alpha Kubuntu fail to meet most of my expectations, I found the install very prone to lock up. (read I have an OLD athlon XP PC)

A agree with the above posts, new releases in Ubuntu have given me rise to start to look elsewhere for a desktop. Jaunty pushed me right over the top. Debian for me, at least for now.

The myriad of non-supported software which used to work but now fails is a little disconcerting. I really believe a PC that can't auto-sense Flash player failure, and Java coding failure, leaves the OS a bit lacking. And looking and working for days to correct these issues, versus a repository autoloader or some such, leaves the community working a lot harder than likely necessary.

Since these are click and corrected in MS, it's embarrassing spending hard time correcting issues that used to work in Ubuntu and now fail.

The boot loader on the Live CD I used erased my partitions (and yes, I validated the CD it had no errors), even after I cancelled the install due to my personal inability to have the installer leave my second SATA drive alone. I used to have a dual boot system, the alpha Live CD deleted this, and the bravo hard drive partition, effectively deleting my working desktop.

I know there's a reason we call it alpha software. Still, the ext4 file system never resulted in a speed increase or a stable platform, and after then resetting via the CD back to ext3, I never got the system acting stable. I actually saw just the opposite, the ext4 system install while on the wired LAN was unbearably slow at any web page access. Looked like dial up from 10 years ago. Never found out why, as the system was anything but stable.

I do use a US Robotics wireless PCI card, whose driver (TI ACX111) needs to be set manually, my bad, still, it's been working on an Ubuntu desktop for over a year, so I figure that one piece of hardware likely didn't cause the issues I saw.

I also use a BOSE USB drive external sound card, and was again disappointed that despite Debian Lenny recognizing the card and working fine, the Kubuntu offering still fails to run the BOSE system under anything other than OSS (Why???)

I seem to be in a minority here, so I hope others don't have the issues I had. Just so I don't get too flamed, I did attempt to report all of this via developer back channel, but those uploads all failed, so whatever my system was doing, it never got a chance to tell the developers. but I won't shirk my duty, hpefully this will help someone to correct some issues.

I normally don't install Alphas, and try not to install Betas on a production machine. Unfortunately, when I had had good luck with 7.10, I installed 8.04 LTS within a week of its release. 8.04 felt more like a Beta on my production machine than a released version, and it wasn't until July that enough revisions had occurred to make Hardy Heron feel more like a stable release. I then proceeded to crash my Hardy install in October, 2 weeks before the Intrepid Ibex release, so I thought, WTH, and installed Intrepid. Intrepid also had what I would call 'growing pains' until about January, when enough revisions had been gone through that most of the application mix was stable. I have stuck it out without going to Debian, Mandriva, or OpenSUSE (I have tried all three on my hardware, if not extensively, and they seem to work as well for me as Ubuntu) for most of my needed applications, but I have been tempted.

I like Ubuntu. I especially like the Ubuntu Forums, but I think I may wait until June or later to update to Jaunty Jackalope. No one has indicated, but have they got Jack and either ALSA or PulseAudio to play nicely together on Jaunty? How about, have they got better support for some of the 6200 nVidia cards in X? Those are problem areas which have almost driven me away.

I also never use Alphas but pulled the trigger with Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha 5. Several things seem faster but most noticeable for me is the better rendered font on my LCD screen. It is hard to describe but visually feels more polished than prior versions.