I have to tell you. My development machine is an Intel Q6600, P5K mainboard with 6G of RAM and a NVIDIA card. Not a low-end PC after all.
After this little intro, please read my mindset carefully.
Can KDE 4 compositing effects be slow on that beast? (1) Yes of course, they can. Well, they are. If you are used to OSX, you’d start screaming!
Can KDE 4 compositing effects be slow on the avg(“Joe”) machine? (2) Yes, they can. Sometimes I think that the compositing stuff on Linux is a joke. I myself can’t work with Compiz/whatever, it’s tremendously slow, especially when you just want to watch a YT video or a full HD one off your drive.
Can KDE 4 ease the management of your Digital Camera? (3) Yes, it can (this triggers a funny thing, read below)
Can KDE 4 ease the configuration of your Printers like 3.x did? (4) Of course not! Where the **** is kdeprint? I mean, hey, W*F? Do you really think that newbies can easily find the CUPS Web admin interface? Oh well, that’s integration! Yeah, Digital Cameras management is more important than this.
What about unpacking a simple zip/tar file? (5)
KDE 3.5: 2 clicks
KDE 4: Ark being a hell, close it, open konsole, run unzip/tar/*
What a pain in <complete the sentence…>
Ok, let’s move over, (6) I start KDE4 for the first time, what happened to my DESKTOP as it was since Windows 95! KDE devs answer: “hey dude, 2009 is coming, that’s an old concept”. Ok, so, no more Desktop files as we were all used (even OSX has it, maybe for a good reason?). So, unless you do accept that a horrendous Plasmoid called something like “Directory viewer” (I don’t recall the correct name) can work fine for you even if: (a) it’s slow, (b) uses Plasma which after a few days will start sucking around 30% of your 6G RAM, (c) it’s terrible and not usable, you will end up not having your desktop anymore. Oh also, if you use Dolphin, apart from being barely usable and resource hungry, you will see a nice “?” icon on that dir. Is it making fun of me? Probably so.
What about Kate 4? (7) Nein! You cannot work on large Python files anymore without waiting 5-6 seconds every time you want to open a bracket. Also, on 4.1, filenames usage highlighting (tremendously hard to explain in other words) doesn’t work, you gotta live with it. For me it’s just like using a car with one wheel less.
What about Kate 4 (2!)? (8) My perfectly formatted source code! Being used with Kate 3.5 to clean up every single useless space char from my code. I’m having hard times to do the same on this *new* version, not because of the missing space mark, but because the feature is somehow buggy. Here’s why I started switching to Emacs, very slowly. Kate 3.5 allowed me to work on 60 different files without crossing my mind btw.
So, I am now a happy GNOME user. No memory leaks, speed, comfort, stability and integration. Thank you KDE4 for the total disaster.
I do not give a s*it about this, that and this. I want to use it, not just look and say *wow*.
Waiting for KDE 4.2… sigh!
Sabayon 4 will be a well-tested rolling release, this means you can expect a 4.1 at the beginning of February, as I said some time ago, we’ll start releasing faster, quite easy now that Entropy is mostly in place and working quite well. Hopefully, 4.1 will containt KDE 4.2 and for sure, the amazing 2.6.28 Linux kernel. We don’t plan to create a “4.1″ branch but using “4″ instead for at least 3 rolling releases (so till 4.3, scheduled at the end of Spring 2009).
