How stable do you feel KDE4 is? Ready for mainstream use yet? Like KDE4 or 3.5.x?

[OzzyFrank]

Just wanted to see what people thought of KDE4, whether people think it is stable for use by the general public yet, and how they feel it compares to the last of the 3x series. I've personally only looked at Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 on Live CD, and then installed it into Virualbox (where the screen went black after enabling the built-in desktop effects). Do you find it stable, or barely useable? Prefer all the glitter and gadgets over the previous incarnation of KDE, or find them comfusing or an unwelcome distraction? (And do some find it resembles Mac OS X too much for their liking, hehe?)

[Seventh Reign]

Its barely ready to use "just to see what it looks like", let alone for mainstream. They've got some work to do.

[OzzyFrank]

I've had people tell me not to touch it until 4.2, which by then should be fairly stable... apparently.

[Coplen]

It's getting stable. But it's not a quick process. It now doesn't crash 5 minutes into a session as it used to for me. Hopefully soon and it'll be alright. I kinda like it for when I want glitzy.

[p_quarles]

Moved to Recurring Discussions, where other threads on this same topic may be found.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Hard to say.
Yes it does feel more stable then kde3x, but it lacks a lot of functionality right now.
KDE 4.1 is where kde4 will look pretty good I am sure, but 4.2 might be much better.

[samjh]

Just wanted to see what people thought of KDE4, whether people think it is stable for use by the general public yetIn my opinion, no.

KDE4 at the moment, is aimed more at developers than the general public. There are still a lot of missing features, customisation, and some applications have not been fully ported to KDE4.

how they feel it compares to the last of the 3x series. I've personally only looked at Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 on Live CD, and then installed it into Virualbox (where the screen went black after enabling the built-in desktop effects). Do you find it stable, or barely useable? Prefer all the glitter and gadgets over the previous incarnation of KDE, or find them comfusing or an unwelcome distraction? (And do some find it resembles Mac OS X too much for their liking, hehe?)I very much prefer to new look and feel. It is smoother, easier on the eyes, and distinctive compared to other mainstream desktop environments (eg. MacOS, Windows XP and Vista).

The widgets I've seen are quite good, but not much better or worse than their KDE3 cousins.

As for Virtualbox screen going blank when turning on desktop effects, keep in mind that Virtualbox does not support hardware 3D acceleration (I don't think any virtualisation software does), so that isn't the fault of KDE, but a limitation of Virtualbox.