So KDE4 was released, and it is in the tree now too, I didn’t want to try it as a full-fledged desktop environment (I probably won’t until KDE 4.1 at least), but I wanted to try Konqueror, Umbrello, and I ended up trying GwenView too.
A few suggestions and considerations from what I could see:
- you have to install kdebase-data:kde-4 otherwise the icons will be missing; choosing a Gnome-compatible icon theme helps, but it’s not enough;
- you really really really want to enable the pcre USE flag for kdelibs; otherwise Konqueror’s javascript support will suck, and for instance my blog’s javascript won’t work completely as expected;
- you also want to install kstyles, the default style for an unconfigured KDE4 is Oxygen, and without that package the applications will look very very bad;
- you want to use my hack if you want to try KDE4 applications during a KDE 3.5 session;
- for what concerns software correctness, KDE4 hasn’t learnt enough, as you can check on the imported libraries list, as libkcal still contains a copy of libical, and for what concerns commodity libraries, it regressed: KDE 3.5 had a
libkhotkeys_shared.solibrary for the code shared between different khotkeys tools, while KDE 4 hasn’t;
- Konqueror is still crashy, and KHTML developers already told me to either wait till KDE 4.0.1 or use the 4.0.1 Subversion branch;
- HTTP authentication in Konqueror doesn’t work that well; I use it for Awstats on this server, and I just can’t check it from Konqueror 4;
- KDE4 looks nicer in a few details, maybe 4.1 will be enough to replace 3.5, by this pace.
This is all for now 😉