Kubuntu

I'm playing with a basic Kubuntu 10.04 install.
I was such a KDE 3.5 fan, and I love Linux. I use Linux by command line every day.
But I do so from the vantage point of Mac OS X. I've lost my love of KDE.

I could maybe go back to using KDE 3.5, but never 4. It has improved, and playing with the KDE4 version of my familiar home Mandriva desktop was acceptable with Mandriva 2010. But a fresh install is confusing, overwhelming and downright irritating.

The popup menu in the bottom left. In Windows, that's the start menu. What is it here? What would make me click that, if I was familiar with Windows?

I was looking for Konsole. I clicked the K menu and found a Windows Vista style start menu. Not impressed with how KDE seems to continually and blindly copy the worst of Windows.

I clicked through to Applications and found that the Utilities item used a console as its icon. So I pointed at it. Nothing happened. I have to click.

I search the new menu for Konsole. It's not there. Later, I find Konsole until the System menu.

It just popped up a notification that there were updates. That firstly was distracting but then as I moved my mouse to it, it disappeared. Where did it go? I don't know. It was important enough to stop me writing this but not enough to wait around for me to click on it.

Dolphin: don't get me started. What happened to the idea of the integrated Konqueror interface? What has it all been broken up again for? And to something that is so much more difficult to use! This is a primary reason I prefer KDE3.5. It just has file browsing right.

Active windows - I can barely notice the difference between active and inactive windows. Very very poor UI.

Konsole itself even has become noticeably uglier and more difficult to use in KDE4. Why was that even changed?