KDE 4.1: Good, bad, or beautiful?

The last week, I’ve been struggling with KDE 4.1. As was pretty obvious from my previous articles, I really want to like it. Actually, I do like it. It’s stable, it’s fast, and it’s gorgeous. I love the Oxygen look, the plasmoids, the KWin desktop effects…it all looks great.
On the software side there’s much to like too. I haven’t used Dolphin extensively yet, but I can’t find any faults with it. I like the layout, even the three column view; I like the breadcrumbs, I like the fact that yes, it does have tabs.
Amarok 2 is pretty sweet. At the moment, it’s still in alpha, which means it lacks some features, but the stability was just fine. The layout is a definite improvement over the 1.4 series, and it went through and played my collection just fine.
Arch Linux users should also check out Shaman, which is like Synaptic, only for Arch. It works just as well and fast as its more famous counterpart, with the added bonus of some really funny icons in the system tray. I won’t spoil things, but if you know that Arch’s package management is called “pacman”…

It actually works well too. I haven’t had any major problems, except the nvidia issue, which was solved pretty easily with this fix.

Unfortunately, that still left me with a lot of minor problems.

Not all of the plasmoids work well. The traditional KDE-Menu sometimes disappears, sometimes it stops working. It also doesn’t get updated when you install new software.The system tray sometimes shows icons, sometimes they don’t. The clock sometimes disappears. Also, it’s kind of hard to select, resize, or move them. It’s not very intuitive.

Sound didn’t work for me at first. For Arch Linux users, this fixed it for me
. It’s not very hard, but not something I’d think of by myself. Also, the KMix icon in the systray doesn’t have a main slider, just a “Mixer” button. Why not show the mixer in the first place then?

Panel configuration is almost non-existent. I don’t want all applications in the panel, just the ones of the current desktop. Also, I’d like some transparency. I hope this gets added.

There’s no “Hide all windows and show desktop” shortcut, like Windows+D in Windows. That one’s baffling, as most distributions even provide a button in the panel that does this. It’s an often used function, so why isn’t it included?

All of this kind of gives me a “it works, but it’s not quite finished” feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think the KDE guys are moving in the right direction, I just don’t think they’re there, not yet. That’s the reason I won’t be using it at this time. Right now, my Openbox-setup just gives me more configuration possibilities.

Still, thumbs up. 4.1 is an enormous improvement over 4.0. I hope 4.2 continues that trend.

San