Arstechnica reviews KDE 4.0

KDE 4.0 was recently released and Arstechnica has done what I consider a pretty thorough and fair review of this major new release.

KDE 4.0 - first impressions

KDE 4.0 has finally been released to the world and I had to take a look so I installed the packages on my laptop that runs Kubuntu 7.10. I followed this guide to install it and it installed without any problems. I logged out, choose KDE4 session and logged in again and got a KDE4 session. What follows is a bunch of my first impressions.

It's shiny. I like that!

Default fonts are less than optimal. They are thick/bold. This should be resonably easy to correct though and I have already made some changes, but the defaults aren't very good. Particularly if you use Firefox, Thunderbird (and probably other non KDE apps) looks bad.

The taskbar have no settings to configure, it clearly is something that's quickly put together. My laptop have a widescreen and I've actually moved it to the left side. That doesn't seem possible currently.

I loaded some of the widgets, a battery monitor would be nice on a laptop and it loaded fine, but I could drag and drop it to the taskbar. I thought that was supposed to work, but apparently not.

The desktop effects are pretty nice. Like the taskbar few, if any settings are available. They worked fine for a while, but then my they became jerky for some reason and I disabled them. No crashes.

I played around a bit with Dolphin. For some reason it tried to use Thunderbird to open jpg pictures. Simple change, but pretty odd. The preview feature didn't seem to work that well with my pictures either. It made previews of a few of the pictures in a folder, but for most of the pictures it just showed an icon.

I'm not particularly impressed by the start menu. If you search for an application in the integrated search bar, then that search still shows up next time you click on the start menu. The way you navigate through the applications don't seem optimal to me either.

So, in total, not really a raving review is it? Well, much of it I believe can be fixed resonably easy and it has been announced quite a bit that this KDE 4.0 is a bit rough around the edges, but I think their reasons for releasing it are good. KDE 4.1 will likely be a very different animal and have a most of the polish that lacks and I'm really looking forward to what they will have ready at that time. A lot more apps will have been ported to KDE4 by that time as well.

KDE 4.0 released!

It's out! Huge congrats and thanks to all people that have been part of creating KDE 4!

I played around with a live cd last night and it certainly is promising. It is important to remember that the goals of this release wasn't to create a desktop that rivals KDE 3.5.x. KDE 4.0 is the foundation. All the big changes are "under the hood". For many people, it will be better to stick with KDE 3.5.x until at least KDE 4.1 is released.

Draft KDE 4.0 release schedule

A draft KDE 4.0 release schedule has been posted!

KDE 4.0 will not contain all features announced nor promised: these will come during the lifetime of KDE 4. We can probably switch quickly to a KDE 4.1 release if there are major subsystems ready for merging soon after the KDE 4.0 hits the streets. Also remember that we have been porting for a couple years and we need to get this show on the road.

Release soon and release often.