KDE 4.0.0!

[Chris Gow]

On Friday 11 January 2008 09:34:09 Dotan Cohen wrote:
>
> Please report back with installation issues and usage problems. I've
> very excited, but I cannot play russian rulette with my laptop.
>
Works ok for me. I've been following the development of 4.0.0 pretty closely, 
so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect user experience-wise. That 
said, here's what I've discovered so far:

The Bad:

- I can not distinguish between active and inactive windows in 4.0.0. The 
Oxygen theme uses grey (and it appears to be the same grey) for both active 
and inactive window title bars. Now, this might be ok if you have compositing 
turned on (so you can enable fading/shadows etc..) but my laptop doesn't have 
hardware acceleration.

- System Settings allows me to select compositing even though I'm pretty sure 
it knows that my X is not capable of doing it (I need to remember how to 
disable KDE options)

- There are a lot less plasmoids/widgets than I expected. Dunno if it is 
packaging releated (perhaps not built yet) or KDE decided to strip some out. 
For example there is no:
	- Way to change the Analog Clock to that old bedside table analog clock (the 
ones where the numbers flipped around)
	- No weather applet
	- No picture applet
	- Notes/twitter applet
	
Some of these I've seen just on developer videos, others I had seen in the 
betas.

The Good:

- You can run 3.5.x apps alongside 4.0.0 apps, which is what I am doing with 
kontact. There doesn't seem to be any problems with that. You get a 
separate .kde4 directory so your mails and any 3.5 apps won't get corrupted.

- I really like the new menu system. The search bar at the top makes it really 
easy to find apps that I know I want: I just type in the app name and the 
menu filters down to the applications that match. This is kind of humorous 
considering the KDE Program Naming Convention thread. 

- It seems faster. Application launching is about the same, but when an app is 
up the applciation seems more responsive

- The UI is pretty slick, the menu (did I mention the menu) is much easier to 
work with than the one in 3.5 (I have a 3.5 environment on another PC and its 
annoying to go through the menu there :)

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it so far. I've been running 4.0 for most of 
this week and was anxiously awaiting the 'official' announcement. I really 
can not wait to see what comes for 4.1

-- chris