First up is the size, kdebase & libs is a shade over 100mb installed so the only way to get it running is on a sd card (CF refuses to do anything with pdaXrom for me, even then CF wouldnt really be an option as I imagine most people will use the CF slot for wifi). Even if you could resize the root partition to the full 128 mb its just not going to fit. (Maybe a C3000 would have been a better buy, oh well)
I have it installed inside a 200mb ext3 img file stored on a bog standard 256mb san-disk SD card, so any indications of performance must take this dog slow setup into account.
I have set it as the default window manager so it loads with X
Takes a while to load up to the desktop but once there its suprisingly snappy, just don't set the performance slider to max when you first run
If you take a few mins to go through the config dialogues and turn off all the eye candy (except wallpaper and AA fonts), stop KDE pre-loading (or keeping loaded) a copy of konq on boot and a few other things, start time can be reduced.
Apps take a second or five (depending if its loading from internal flash, or my SD based image) and once up are very usable. Using Konq to browse file for instance is easily quick enough, as are all the other apps I tried.
Ignoring the cache, you have around 25mb of ram to run applications in once its up, cpu use never drops below 40%.
The biggest niggle is that its very fiddly with the stylus & touch screen. You very quickly realise kde is intended for use with a real mouse.
With a few tweaks, KDE could make a very attractive WM for a PDA. Although realistically it probably wont be a prefered option until we're running around with devices that have at least 256/128 Flash/Ram.
Drag and Drop needs to be clobberd.
I am unable to network at the moment, pdaXrom ignores the usb cable and my wifi gear is in the post, so I have no idea how snappy things like konq are when presented with a real task, like webpages.
Running from an image on SD is a big limitation, if you dont have network then your forced to drop out of KDE & unmount everything just to transfer data to the PDA. It might be better running from CF (and perhaps with a swap file on SD/CF), but anything that forces you to carry excessive additional hardware (usb lan adapters, hubs, etc) kinda defeats the objective of using a PDA.
It does have real WOW factor and despite everything I have said above, you have GOT to try it for yourself.
