The title is hyperbole; Kubuntu didn't really break my monitor. But last night it felt like it did. Here's why.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and probably the other buntus too, all show an icon on the taskbar when software updates are ready to be installed. This is a good thing. A couple of weeks ago, I clicked said icon on my Kubuntu 8.10 taskbar and gave the go-ahead to do all the updates. By the time it had finished, KDE had been uninstalled and the machine would no longer boot into X.
Shit.
apt-get install kubuntu-desktop complained about broken packages, so I sighed and went for apt-get install ubuntu-desktop instead. For the last two weeks I've been using GNOME for the first time in about 7 years.
I really quite liked it. I was impressed by Nautilus's speed and simplicity, and the general absence of rough edges. That's not to say the edges were particularly smooth, but at least they weren't posing a tetanus risk like the rusty mantrap that is KDE 4.1, which I had been using for a few months previously.
So away I happily geek'd until yesterday when I started to miss KMail, and thought "right, the Kubuntu repositories can't have been left broken for more than a week. I'll try reinstalling KDE". To my astonishment, I got KDE 4.2, which isn't supposed to be available in Kubuntu 9.04 unless you add a "PPA" to your /etc/apt/sources.list. I double checked - I definitely had only the standard repositories.
So I arrived at KDE 4.2 early. I thought at first that this might not have been such a good idea, as the first thing it shows you is a nice big dialog detailing all the problems Akonadi had starting up. But it's actually very nice. Less of a mantrap, now a mere tripwire. It looks great, and it's clearly the way forward, architecturally (which is why I don't just save myself the pain and use GNOME, which looks rather like it's about to undergo a dreaded KDE3-to-4-style transition of its own).
There was just one slight problem: in the top left corner of my Dell 2001FP, I spied a ghostly Ubuntu logo! I didn't think this kind of thing was possible on an LCD. I thought it was the NVIDIA drivers being broken. But no - Ctrl+Alt+F7 showed it was visible even on a text console!
It was my first encounter with LCD "image persistence". It seems that it's not the same as burn-in on a CRT or plasma display, and that it's reversible by simply turning the monitor off for a while, or maybe displaying a pure white image for a few minutes, depending on who you believe. Good thing too, as I was ready to blame this on Kubuntu, as the title indicates.
So anyway, most of this post is just the background to my discovery of image persistence, and is not intended to have a dig at either GNOME or KDE. The devs have done 15 million tons of brilliant work done on KDE in the last few years and it's starting to pay off.
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