Building a machine on the side out of the broken laptop for my brother in law, decided to go with Kubuntu (which Soni uses on her laptop) instead of Gentoo, as he doesn't have a connection to the internet, and doesn't have any interest in learning how to administer linux boxes (also, not sure the machine really can stand up to all that wear-and-tear any more, we keep needing to replace components on it).

DVD player (Kaffeine) didn't work, the "what to do with the DVD" box popped up on both my login and his, and the result was that he couldn't access the DVD. When that was fixed, program couldn't find a plugin to handle the DVD. Sigh.

Also, there's no way to specify that the user can keep the password you just set for them... annoying. Having the entire "user management" box go blank whenever I chose "administrator mode" was a bit annoying too. Knetworkmanager isn't letting the machine connect for some reason either. Was working yesterday, today it's just hanging at 28%.

I feel like I've been using Windows. Try something, fails, try the exact same thing, fails, try again, works this time. No way to see what's going wrong, just have to keep trying the same incantation until whatever's messed up clears away. The changes from stock KDE (which I use on my box) don't seem all that useful, and they do seem to make the result less stable.

[Update] Soni, more accustomed to Ubuntu-isms, was able to get the networking up. She just ran /etc/init.d/networking restart, then told knetworkmanager to reconnect. Switched to gmplayer for the DVD playing, simply because we know it works. Usability is apparently mostly just a proxy for familiarity.