It is good to be back “home”
Posted by salvador on 21 January 2009
Well, that pretty much sums it all. After a little more than one month trying out KDE 4.1, it is great to be back on Gnome, thanks to the GSB Team (GSB-Testing now has Gnome 2.24.3 for Slackware 12.2).
Around December this year, I had upgraded Slackware on my notebook to the latest version (12.2), and since it would take a little while for the GSB and DLG teams to get a working version, I have decided to try out KDE 4.1 which could be found on Slackware’s -curent testing repository. I must say that, despite the title of this post, I was surprised in a very good way.
KDE 4 is far, far better than KDE 3. The overall interface improved a lot, some of its highlights to me are:
- The menu application launcher is cool
- The “plasmoid system” is interesting
- Simplified configuration menu, a lot better than the usual “boing 747 panel” on old kcontrol
- Good looking default theme
- The file manager dolphin is very good, reminding me a little of nautilus
There were also some other interesting things, but unfortunately they are escaping me right now. Nevertheless, what really drove me back from KDE 4 were the bugs, like:
- Dolphin crashing all the time for aparent no reason
- Very very slow window redraw and moving (kwin)
- Slow overall performance (playing some stuff like UT2004 with KDE running was simply impossible)
- Not being able to map several of my keyboard’s special keys (play, stop, etc)
- Screwed up icons on the notification area
Now mind you, KDE 4.1 is more or less on a testing state, I am sure most of those issues will be resolved on 4.2. And I also like more Gnome’s polished interface in general 
, so, it is good to be back home.
Kudos for the KDE4 team!
