So to follow up with a thread I created several months ago on KDE 4.1 vs Gnome (
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=911735) I am going to report that 4.2 has been released and by looking at the release notes it seems that the developers have romoved many of the usability kinks that plagued the 8.04 and 8.10 KDE 4.x releases which were some of the best ones done by any distro bar only to maybe OpenSuSE.
Although, because I am lazy and MOREOVER because I don't want to install from an experimental PPA and deviate the stock KDE provided right now with both 8.10 and 9.04-Alpha I would like to invite to the table any KDE devs who would like to talk about all the developments seen both on the review sites and talk about some of the more unnoticed changes that are going on under the hood and also other added features.
Mostly I am hearing the claim that 4.2 is what 4.0 was aspiring to be on first release and that 4.0 == alpha and 4.1 == beta. Now reguardless whether I or anyone else agrees with that analysis is point aside the question that I think needs to be asked how does KDE 4.2 compare to the gold standard that 3.4 set and 3.5 raised? Are "little" things like bringing back right-click application menus on the desktop and global "mac" style menus back along with a whole slew of other features that seemed to get swept under the rug. Also does Kopete's Yahoo protocol still list everyone who has ever contacted me under one of my groups (this is a really weird bug that doesn't occur in the KDE 3.x version or in Pidgin)?
Speaking of which, other issues that are important: what is the status of the associated third party software. While it seems that Amarok finally released a stable version for 4.x, many people's favorite applications are in limbo as of now and there isn't much info on the net about what's going on. Will K3B release a K4B soon? What about Kaffiene, KOffice, Konversation, and a whole kslew of kapplikations? (Yes, I did.)
To finish on the up side I hear that 4.2 is much faster because of QT 4.5 and that further speed improvements are in the works for future releases. Also screen shots of the new Air theme in my opinion have a better look than the default Oxygen theme.
Bookmarks