anyone else using KDE4? What are your thoughts

[tone33]

I just installed Kubuntu with KDE4 and it looks really really sharp. But i'm having several issues with screen repaint, update bugging out, etc. Still seems pretty buggy. I'm running a fast machine - 3.0Ghz hyperthreaded 3GB RAM. Just curious about others experiences so far.

[Whiffle]

On my Arch box, the KDEmod version of KDE4 is nice. Its very usable, although I can tell its a little heavy or unoptimized for my 1.6 GHz pentium 4.

On my laptop, I've got hardy with a more up to date version of KDE4 (4.1.something) than is found in the regular repo, and it works okay, not as nice or as polished as the KDEmod version on the other box, but its okay.

In another 6 months I bet it'll be nicer, and faster.

[mrsteveman1]

I like the direction KDE4 is going, esp some of the lower level work they are doing.

However, at this point even with KDE4.1 I fail to see how anyone could use it for any length of time without going crazy. It's a good foundation, the libraries are apparently fast, but the desktop simply isn't there right now. There are some cool features, but some of them make little sense. They have the items in the ~/Desktop folder set to appear inside a window rather than on the desktop, which is annoying. Suse appears to have actually undone this little "feature" back to the prior behavior that makes more sense, ~/Desktop = on the desktop.

There is significant interest being generated for KDE4 because it looks nice by default. I'm no GNOME fan, but GNOME can be made to look just as nice with some quick work, it just looks like windows95 by default for some reason.

Hopefully once some of the features that were present in KDE3 are put in KDE4 it will be more useful.

[Sorivenul]

I'm not much of a KDE fan in general, but the latest pre-release of PC-BSD 1.7 has a nice, functional KDE4 setup.

[pansz]

KDE 4.1.1+openSUSE 11.0 runs smoothly on my 667MHz Pentium III with 512M mem, integrated intel 810 graphics card. Everything works great if I do not turn on the desktop effect.


Note: I have five computers and I experience 2D performance penalty on all my computers with kwin composite on. Turn off the desktop effect and everything went well.

This obviously is a KDE4 issue, since GNOME+compiz works great on all of my computers.

[adam_kimber]

I just installed Kubuntu with KDE4 and it looks really really sharp. But i'm having several issues with screen repaint, update bugging out, etc. Still seems pretty buggy. I'm running a fast machine - 3.0Ghz hyperthreaded 3GB RAM. Just curious about others experiences so far.

I am running a fast machine dual core 3GHz and 2GB RAM with a 8800GT graphics card. It looks sweet but is rather slow on this machine. Things take a while to load. Plus sound does not work. :(

[Xiong Chiamiov]

I'm actually quite fond of all the new apps, especially the new dolphin (the old one crashed on me all the time). There are still a few bugs, but it's overall pretty nice.

Plasma, however, is incredibly frustrating to me. There are two things that I immediately wanted to change, and can't:
1) right-click on desktop -> open kmenu
2) completely transparent panel

It seems the only way to get #2 is through a theme with a transparent image, which is annoying and not easily customizable when I switch to a wallpaper that requires a panel that's only partially transparent, and in a specific color to match the wall.

Right now, I'm running fluxbox on top of KDE, mainly for window-tabbing (can't live without it!). I find it strange that I'm not interested in the speed of fluxbox, but rather just some basic customizability. That has been one of KDE's strong points, and they seem to have lost it. As we've all learned from Machiavelli, it's *really* hard to give people something, then take it away.

[tone33]

I'm new to KDE, coming from Gnome, and only on Ubuntu. (So still relatively new to linux). Think i'm going reinstall Kubuntu with KDE3 and see if that works out better. I thought Gnome is ok, but it does look and feel like an older version of windows... which is really what i'm trying to get away from!

[doorknob60]

KDE4 is FTW! At least in Intrepid. If you don't like it in Hardy, I'll tell you now that it's better in INtrepid :) It's sweet :KS

[OutOfReach]

openSUSE KDE: Very nice, I have no problems with it.
Kubuntu: Very buggy, to the point were I wasn't able to use it.

[doorknob60]

openSUSE KDE: Very nice, I have no problems with it.
Kubuntu: Very buggy, to the point were I wasn't able to use it.

Try it again in when Intrepid comes out. I tried it in Hardy and it was buggy (I'll admit it was before 4.1 final, but not too long before), but in Intrepid, it's really good. Better than when I tried OpenSuse (I beleive KDE 4.1 was in RC when I tried it). Anyways, it's good, and I like it. If you don't like it, stick with KDE 3.5 (or be stupid and use Gnome :-P)

[karellen]

I'll try again KDE 4.1 when Mandriva 2009 is released. for some reason, I really like what Mandriva's developers do with KDE

[chirpilittle]

I installed it for fun... and so far... I can't stand how you cannot drop drag or anything on the desktop... I can't get my laptop's sound wheel to work... and bugs are popping up everywhere.

Anymore of this and I'll go mad! It's probably back to Gnome for me.

[Whiffle]

I don't know why this is, but I've been using it on my laptop (1.86GHz pentium M, intel GMA 915), and it absolutely flies. A few versions ago they were having issues with NVIDIA cards, which is what is in my desktop, and that made it go really slow on those, I may have to see if that is still the case, because I think my desktop should be doing better considering how great its running on my laptop.

Speaking of which, under ubuntu i'm using the version from:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

[Robbyx]

I have just installed it into 8.10 and although it looks great things are not where I expect them and I can not find them.

1. All my desktop icons are not showing.
2. I do not know how to access any of my applications as per gnome. I can not see an icon to click on which opens the list of applications.
3. All my bookmarks, ie favourite directories, have disappeared.
4. None of the icons put into the panel are appearing.

Robin

[Mazza558]

KDE 4.1 is good, much better than 4.0.

KDE 4.2 looks like it's going to be awesome though.

[samwyse]

I went from KDE3.5 to Gnome. That's my current opinion of KDE4 (and QT4).

[Viranh]

I really like the look of KDE 4.1 and the programs are pretty fast, however, I can't turn on desktop effects or everything slows to a crawl. I can't resize plasmoids on the desktop or the computer freezes and I have to restart X. I can't open anything in the desktop container or the computer freezes. Sometimes it doesn't quite freeze, it just goes really slowly. When a window opens or closes, it looks awful. A bunch of colored lines, bits of other windows, etc. At first I thought it was because I was using the Kubuntu 8.10 beta, but even though I have since updated, KDE isn't running any better. I installed gnome and am running compiz and having no problems there, but I don't really like gnome, so I'm hoping that KDE 4.2 works better for me.