B.W.H. van Beest posted on Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:08:31 +0100 as excerpted:
> Sorry gents, but after two month of stumbling with KDE 4 (OpenSuse 11.2)
> I downgraded my Suse 11.2 back to 11.1. Reason? KDE 4 is still not
> ready for serious work. At least not for me. It is too much geared in my
> view to have a nice look, but I find it cumbersome.
> Nothing works the intuitive way! Everything is slow. It is the Vista
> of Linux.
>
> I know that much work has been done, and is still ongoing, to get KDE in
> shape. I truly appreciate this work. For me, I will wait another year,
> to give it another try.
For a lot of people, that's going to be the wise way to go. Each
six-month kde 4.x version bump brings massive improvements, and I've been
predicting for some time that 4.5 would be the "magic" version when it
finally gets ready for "normal" use (despite kde's claims, apparently for
a different audience since they seem to be targeting devs not users now,
that 4.2 was ready for "normal" use... maybe it is... for devs to build
their apps on -- /that/ use!). There's just too much wrong with the
current versions, too many known bugs they're still working on, for it to
be anything but beta.
But as I said, each 4.x version has brought massive improvements, with
4.0 being conference level tech demo, 4.1 being early alpha, 4.2 late
alpha (many features not yet implemented or stub-leveled), 4.3 finally
getting to beta quality (mostly implemented, but seriously buggy), 4.4,
due out next month, predicted to be rc quality (no more show-stoppers,
but some bugs yet to fix and edges to smooth out before release), and
4.5, due in August, hopefully finally actual release quality.
Thus a year will give 4.5 time to settle in a bit and your distribution
(OpenSuSE you said) time to pick it up. =:^)
The only thing I'm a bit worried about is kmail, which is supposed to be
switching to akonadi with 4.5. But they could have tried for 4.4, so
maybe they're learning that users actually want something they can work
on and depend on. But I do honestly believe that with the possible
exception of those using kmail (in that form like me, or kontact), 4.5
should be quite solid indeed, and kmail should hopefully be /reasonably/
good, as they /do/ seem to be deliberately taking a bit more time with it
than they did with, say, the release of plasma as the only desktop with
4.0, while it was still barely stubbed out.
But the good thing is, you got a head start on things this time, and can
be pleasantly surprised with 4.5 in a year, when you try kde4 again. =:^)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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