I tried, I really tried to use Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Just after the first exitement I had to come back to the conclusion that it just sucks!

I'm running Gentoo now again and my laptop is faster, more usable, better tuned, easier to maintain and just much more sympathic. Ubuntu stood more in my way than it did anything else. I can't take an operating system seriously that is constantly thrashing on the harddisk like that's its major purpose in life. I do have a rather powerful machine and on Gentoo it's perfectly ok to not own a SSD.

There are just not thousands of applications installed that I rarely or never use - but which eat resources all the time. Now I'm lacking nothing, but my laptop uses about 6 Watts less power - that's more than a third! If Ubuntu wouldn't have messed with my laptop battery, I'd now have the promised five hours of battery runtime for my machine. Well, it's still four now.. ;)

Also I now decided to "do it right"TM and build a totally streamlined, lean and mean working machine. No Gnome dependencies, no sucking KDE4, just XFCE and Compiz. And I don't even run ACPId or anything - everything is done via UDev/HAL and I'm looking forward to next UDev versions that will make HAL deprecated. Then there are running only a handful of system services.

A good and stressfree life. :)