To say that I am disappointed would be an understatement - What I had wanted was speed and more raw speed. Cleaup of driver compatibilities and more out-of-the-box experiences with things like webcams, etc.

Instead what we have is an OS with a weird unusable theme (bug532633), a lot of time and resources spent in beautifying and optimizing the boot-up screen/time (idea 21). KDE 4.4.1 takes up 450mb of RAM on startup, 100% CPU spent on the semantic desktop (doing fast indexing) and still the network-manager sucks. KDE’s user interface has weird interactions like the Cashew  and widgets (plasmoids) that take up a shit load of RAM. Moreover, if you disable expensive features like compositing in KDE, the desktop looks like shit - the reason being that the desktop rendering code gets polluted if proper handling of non-compositing is done.

Has anyone on the dev team even used Windows 7 ? Why does Kubuntu (KDE Ubuntu) take up more resources on my machine than Win7 ? Already, Linux has a disadvantage on laptop battery life, compared to Win7 - but this is just absurd.

People are moving towards using thin and light (and extremely underpowered) - and all I see on all support forums is advice to upgrade RAM.

This is crap and I am extremely disappointed.