Unfortunately, the slashdot link Sean attached now has an editorial update saying that, according to a more accurate benchmark by the same author, KDE 4.0 uses 110 MB more memory than KDE 3. Maybe he forgot to turn on those gizmos for the test.
Though looking at the tester's page, I think he's still refining his tests (with feedback). I imagine the best sense of how it runs is going to be when it gets released and we try it out. On the distro question, my impression from Theresa was that from experience Debian ran more stably on student hardware than Ubuntu. But if we wanted to look at alternatives, Xubuntu might be worth a look. It uses a more lightweight desktop, and the Gnome and KDE desktops are probably the heaviest parts of Ubuntu. Bill
