[Cialug] KDE 4

[Nathan Stien]

On Jan 11, 2008 11:36 AM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:
> Just saw KDE4 was released. Looks sharp. I've been running KDE 4
> applications in Gutsy (but I use the GNOME desktop) for a while now. If
> you're an Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7.10 user you can install KDE 4 pretty easily by
> following these instructions: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-4.0.php
>

So I got the gutsy kde4 packages yesterday.  I am a historically a big
KDE partisan, and I loves me some KDE.  But I was profoundly
disappointed with KDE4.  It felt chintsy and buggy.  Alpha quality.
Drawing problems (flicker/refresh bugs), window focus problems, and
other glitches really hurt the experience.  I had a couple different
Konqueror windows open, and it took me a while to figure out the
reason I could not interact with my konq instances was that one of
them had a modal dialog box open in another desktop, and that stalled
*all* of them.  It sure felt like a downgrade.

The specific kde4 apps that have been upgraded do seem pretty nice.
The games use SVG now, etc.  But a full-blown KDE4 session is just too
crappy for me right now.  Thankfully it puts stuff in ~/.kde4/ instead
of ~/.kde, so my KDE 3.x stuff was unharmed.

My girlfriend, who is no UI design expert, looked at my KDE4 session
and said immediately:  "it looks... old".  I couldn't help but agree.
I'm going back to the 3.x series until they sort things out.  I know I
could do my civic duty and send in bug reports, help fix the bugs,
etc.  But I have to work for a living.  I'll leave this in the capable
hands of the mom's-basement-dwelling plenty-of-free-time crowd.

- Nathan