KDE 4.0

Every cloud has silver lining, but i think this one has something more than just linings, it seems to have silver spots in it. Well, i am talking about the much awaited KDE 4.0 which was released just two days back. It is a free sunday here in India, and i decided to have a peep into what it looks like.


The Installation
The installtion of KDE 4.0 on my OpenSUSE 10.3 was not a big trouble, with the One Click Install for openSUSE 10.3. However of all the packages selected, the digiKam was not installed successfully.

The actual Experience
I logged in again and switched to the KDE 4.0 session, and it was just amazing. With the new applications like Plasma, KickOff, Widgets and KRunner, it seemed to be fun and a completely new UI for me.


This is the dashboard view of Plasma. So, instead of the old, "Show Desktop", you can just switch to dashboard by pressing CTRL+F12 and manage your desktop while letting other applications function.


The screen grid utility is among the other utilities that make the UI very calm and comfortable.

The issues
However there are several issues regarding the use of KDE 4.0. Just like every other Linux application, in its first release, it is quite buggy. It seemed like on every click that i made, the KDE 4.0 crashed. Sometimes, while switched to the dashboard view, the system seems to be not responding. You can see the videos being played in the background, but you can't revert back to the main UI. The Compiz-Fusion that i had installed, seemed to be non functional, and many more. The support documentation is also not enough to explain these issues pretty well.

I think there is still a lot of time, when it will be issue less, and as successful as KDE 3.5.