KDE 4.0’s release was unfortunately not a usable release, since many features one expected from KDE3 were missing or incomplete, and the whole thing felt thrown together. Work has been done since then and now we have KDE 4.1, which KDE says is actually a more complete, usable desktop experience.
While I do commend KDE for making 4.1 feel much more complete and usable, I still have various issues with it:
- Slower interface. Not as much an issue with much newer computers, I’m sure, but it doesn’t feel nearly as snappy as KDE3 did, especially with menus and such. Turning on compositing might have helped, but I don’t use that because it sacrifices speed in the applications you run on top of a desktop just to smooth out the desktop a bit. Unlike many people, I feel that giving the applications you run on your desktop the most amount of resources possible is much more important than having a slightly “smooth” desktop.
- Panel issues. There’s no way to directly place an application launcher in the panel (from what I can tell, anyway; the only way to add an application launcher is to right-click an app from the menu and add it there, which means you can’t add something that’s not in the menu). Worse, though, is that the panel glitched out on me when I was trying to add and remove some widgets from it, making everything spaced out, and I could not restore it to the way it was. I had to delete the panel and create a new one from scratch.
- Menu resizing. The new menu has a resizer on the top right that I was going to try to use. However, when I clicked on it, the menu instantly grew bigger, and locked its minimum size to this new bigger size, so I could only make it larger. I wanted it smaller, but there was no way to put it back to even the default size before I started resizing it.
- Input Actions doesn’t work. I used Input Actions in KDE3 to give me some keyboard shortcuts for things like locking the screen and changing gamma settings (to brighten up some dark games). Unfortunately, Input Actions in KDE4.1 does not work at all. I enabled the KHotKeys daemon from the global settings and ensured that both my action and its group were not disabled, which is all one had to do to get it working in KDE3, but no luck — none of the shortcuts would work at all.
- General bugginess. In addition to the other bugs I noted above, the System Settings crashed on me several times, my mouse pointer setting would revert to the ugly (in my view) default fat black pointer on some occasions (over certain apps and in “busy” mode), and the Add Widget list would constantly move its list elements as I scrolled up and down. I think they need to take some more time with bug-squashing before throwing this thing out to be used.
I’m still looking forward to a stable and useful KDE4 in the future, just as I was when I first tested KDE4 a ways back. But this release, despite KDE’s claims to the contrary, isn’t stable and useful enough. I’ll keep trying future releases, but I definitely won’t be keeping this one.
(Note: all grammatical and spelling errors in this post are because I was sort of sick while writing this… <g> )
