Well I'm a KDE user, at least til the weekend when I once again reinstall Ubuntu. Yes one again Gnome went away, not sure why as I hadn't played with any settings, installed any software or done any updates during the previous session.
After trying repeatedly to fix the issue from bash, I remembered,on the point of dispair that I had previously installed the Kubuntu-Desktop, before giving up I thought I'd see if KDE still worked, it did, brlliant!
Beng a KDE user again after two years with Gnome has been an interesting experience there are many things to like about KDE, Kpackage to start with, this awesome package manage can handle installing both DEBs and RPMs in Ubuntu, simply and easily. Super Karamba is another cool KDE app, allowing the installation of various desktop applets I'm currently running the AeroClock applet(a cool tranparent clock) and the Techmon Lite system monitor, Another very impressive thing about KDE are the cool screen animations menus seem to slide out of some secret drawer, cartoon style balloons unfurl themselves before your eyes as you mouse over icon. Also deeply appreciated is the completeness of the Kmenu, every graphical app can be accessed frim there as well as many terminal apps, That said all is not wine and roses it is much slower then Gnome and this can get to be an issue when trying to run already slow apps like OpenOffice.org and I find myself switching to a simple windows manager to do more processor intensive things like gaming. Still all in all a good experience, I wouldn't choose KDE as a full time replacement for Gnome just yet but I can see why others choose to use it full time.

Aaah the joys of using Alpha software, more trouble with Dapper updates. Tuesday night ran the updates suggested by the update manager, didn't reboot right away as reboot was not required, when I did next reboot the system comes up to the login screen but on login no gnome, just a blank screen, reinstall. did the same upgrade, this time no issues, weird

Quick update, Realplayer is finally working, strange thing is I used the same search string in Google as before but this time the solution popped right up, Ubuntu forums rock.
Had some fun figuring out how to crop and resize my picture with the gimp, fun image I'm drinking out of a coconut in Jamaica, sent the image off to Jono to be added to planet advocacy.

Had a frustrating weekend Linux wise, mostly my own fault, due to incorrectly editing my repositories list prior to trying to apt-get dist-uprgade to Dapper I managed to toast my laptop. Fortunately I have my home directory on a separate partition so my info was safe but trying to reinstall fresh was a trial, the first CD I burned was bad and failed to install, after three attempts with this CD I bit the bullet and burned another one, this one installed and everything worked fine until I attempted a smart upgrade with synaptic, this involved a kernel upgrade which forced a reboot, after the reboot my wifi card wouldn't detect, nor would any other PCMCIA devices, weird. After some research I found a reference to this issue, apparently there was no known way to correct this once it had happen but it was possible to prevent it from happening by editing the blacklist to prevent installation of the patch that causes the problem. So reinstall again, edit blacklist, upgrade working, finally. This needs to be fixed before dappers final release. Now to get all the other stuff I need, Java (yes I know it's nonfree but I need it), free flash plugin (not as critical as java, if everything doesn't work exactly like macromedia flash I'll live), codecs (some of the podcasts I listen to are only available in mp3), last challenge is Realplayer (yes I know it's nonfree also but the BBC doesn't offer a free format, hopefully that will change soon) this one has me stumped it appears to require a lib that is not available in dapper at this time. I did some quick research and couldn't find an easy answer, I will try to reseach this further over the weekend hopefully I'll come up with something, there really needs to be something like Automatix, EasyUbuntu or Debcentral Config for Dapper and it needs to be available by the time the stable release comes out, there's no way someone new to Linux is going to figure this stuff out on their own.
One small victory today. a web developer friend at work asked me if knew of a good WYSIWYG html editor, NVU wasn't powerful enough and he can't afford the commercial stuff, I showed him Quanta and he was very impressed, he's trying it out tonight and promisses me a report when I see him next, since he's already Linux friendly I think we can chalk this up as one for the good guys.
One more great thing, heard back from Jono Bacon today it looks like my little slice of the web is going to be syndicate to the wider world via planet advocacy, and if that's not a great reason to blog more I don't know what is.

Went to Linuxcaffe a couple of weeks ago great place excellent coffee, great music, free wifi and a really friendly owner. The whole operations runs on free software, they let punters burn free music on cds and dvds and they will even burn you a copy of your distro of choice. If you're free software fan in or near the Toronto you should stop by and support this great local business, mention that you're a Linux fan and the staff will treat you like long lost familly. If you are thinking of starting your business based on free software the caffe owners are interested in franchising, which would be a cool way to beat Starbucks.
While at the Linuxcaffe I met up with a couple of guys from the Lugradio forums, Mig21 and jamonation , cool guys, it was good to let the inner geek out.