KDE4: it still needs lots of work!

[oz]

I've been using KDE4 in various forms over the last few weeks and have tried the regular releases, along with their svn/snapshot releases. This effort has been accomplished through various updates, but mostly on fresh installs, using Arch Linux. The regular releases seem to be more stable, but missing features. With the svn installations, you go through random periods of high instability, but you get to see various new features that have been added. Overall, it's been quite a bumpy ride, but a fun one none the less.

In all the versions that I tried, Plasma still crashes often, and various other apps would crash on occasion. In some versions, the new Dolphin file manager would open on the desktop about two minutes after having clicked it to start it. When started from the Konsole, it was generating errors trying to make contact with dbus. Kmail and Konqueror were found to be crash heavy in most every release that I tried.

The new KickOff start menu took a while to become familiar with, but it finally started growing on me. Fortunately, the classic start menu is still available for those that want it. Krunner is a nifty little app to have around, as it can be used for launching applications, and for searching and opening webpages. Konsole has also been polished up and is still a joy to use, at least for me. KDE-games has also been upgraded, and is definitely worth checking out.

At first, I was a bit saddened by the eye-candyish look about KDE4, but it has started to grow on me, and KDE4 does feel faster and it uses less memory than the KDE3.5.x series. It's unfortunate that so many popular apps still have not been ported to KDE4, but it's easy to see why so many distributions are not in a big hurry to jump on KDE4 bandwagon and use it as the default desktop.

By the way, version KDE 4.04 was released just yesterday, but the word on the streets is that it won't be a really stable/usable product for the masses until the 4.1 release at the end of July. Now that I've played with KDE4 some, I'm really looking forward to version 4.1 and the fixes and features it is supposed to bring.

[techieMoe]

Glad to hear your thoughts on this. I'll probably get my first real taste of KDE 4 when a major distribution picks it up, and as you said I doubt many of them will until it's in a more stable state.

I'll try and withhold judgment on the Vista-esque look of it until I've used it for a while, but my initial reaction is that it just looks vile. We'll see.

[oz]

Yeah, lots of people are reporting that KDE4 has too much of a Windows Vista look about it. I'm unable to give an opinion on that since I've never run Vista or even looked at any screenshots, but I am anxious to see just how far one can go with changing the overall look of KDE4. I'm hoping that it becomes highly customizable as it becomes more stable with each new release.

[kveldulf980]

Yeah, lots of people are reporting that KDE4 has too much of a Windows Vista look about it. I'm unable to give an opinion on that since I've never run Vista or even looked at any screenshots, but I am anxious to see just how far one can go with changing the overall look of KDE4. I'm hoping that it becomes highly customizable as it becomes more stable with each new release.

Hopefully, because from what I've seen so far there is very little room for customizing, or at least customizing with any sort of ease. It is still very unstable though.

[bigtomrodney]

No way oz...svn snapshots? You're the last person I expected to be following KDE4 that closely

I'm going to hold off until 4.1 in June/July and hopefully be surprised. I found it fun for short periods but the instability and varying levels of usability were a bit jarring.

Glad to here you like krunner. If you like that you should check out Katapult...it has similar and more advanced functionality in some areas and peacefully co-exists with Krunner.

I usually get my updates on the state of KDE4 by reading two blogs :

aseigo
KDE Pinheiro

Nuno does a lot of the artwork for Oxygen and Plasma and Aaron Seigo is a big driving force in the Plasma area. Actually right across KDE4. I met him at aKademy 2006, nice guy.

Disclaimer: I'm not a blog reading kind of guy. It's only ever worth reading when it's from someone close to the action like these two guys.

[oz]

No way oz...svn snapshots? You're the last person I expected to be following KDE4 that closely

lol...

Yeah, it surprised me a bit, too. I'm usually not a big fan of alpha/beta software, although I have had great results with the Firefox 3 betas since b3 was released.

Regarding KDE4, I've stopped installing the snapshots because the varying degrees of stability and problems were too much for everyday use. I'm actually back to Gnome now, but am looking forward to trying KDE4 again in the future. It's a little disturbing to me how the KDE4 team is making everything so that it takes up so much screen space, by default. Taskbars, panels, icons, widgets, and most other items seem to be huge by default. Guess it's time for everyone to buy that widescreen monitor to accommodate KDE4.

[bigtomrodney]

I remember the KDE crowd were saying that KDE4 was actually using less memory than KDE 3.x but to be honest I wouldn't be so much worried about memory usage as responsiveness. I found it a bit soft even on my big rig which wouldn't be lacking in power in any measure.

[oz]

Yeah, it was feeling slower than KDE3 to me, up until the last snapshot that I tried which was 4.0.73, where it started feeling faster and it was using less memory than version 3, so maybe things will start to improve, even with the snapshots.

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah, it was feeling slower than KDE3 to me, up until the last snapshot that I tried which was 4.0.73, where it started feeling faster and it was using less memory than version 3, so maybe things will start to improve, even with the snapshots.

I really hope so. I'm rooting for them. I always considered my switch to Gnome to be a temporary one but it's been feeling more permanent recently. I'll be happy to be proven wrong on that though.

[oz]

So much of the time, it's either Gnome, or KDE for Linux users, but I've gotta tell you, I like them both very much.

That makes it difficult to choose between one or the other. I'm still not sure on this new direction that KDE is taking with version 4, but I have a feeling that it will either pull me more toward KDE, or push me over to Gnome on a permanent basis.

Hopefully, this will all be cleared up when 4.1 is released in a few more months.