Back in February, I took a look at the new KDE4 and what I had found was less than desired. Always willing to re-address an issue, I installed the newer 4.1 version of the beta and dug around a bit.
I found much of what I had complained about has been cleaned up. Configuration is much easier now and previously missing configuration controls have been put back in place. The KDE team has restored my faith in the new version with this alone. I was dreading a Gnome clone.
They also canned the Duplo Lego look, for something not quite as chunky, but still too large. Thankfully, with the re-established controls in place, you can fix it quickly.
The Plasma widgets never really impressed me and they still don’t, though they are getting better. Dolphin is an interesting file manager, but konqueror still holds my heart there. Both are included, of course, so choice rules supreme. (Not that I do much with a graphical file manager, as the command line is where I typically roam.)
Kickoff finally has the ability to revert to the standard KDE3 style menu. Thank you!
Integration with Compiz-Fussion was seamless and I didn’t run into any troubles – rather amazing considering the complexity of it.
However, the one thing KDE4 still lacks is application stability. I couldn’t go for longer than ten minutes at a time without an application crash. Scrolling menus often didn’t refresh correctly. Shortcut settings would change in the interface, but not work. KMail couldn’t empty the Trash folder on my IMAP accounts without dying. The desktop itself never died, but I couldn’t get much work done.
In short, KDE4 is not ready for real work, but it’s getting better – much better. Once the environment is out of beta, I’m pretty confident at this point that it will suit me just fine and satisfy my needs for a completely configurable desktop environment.
Again, I’m thankful. I didn’t really want to move to Gnome.
Addendum: It appears that the newly released Kubuntu 8.10 has abandoned KDE3 and gone exclusively with KDE4. I can’t imagine why they would do this, considering the issues I’ve seen with lack of stability. Time to dig up a test machine and try a fresh install, I think.
