Back during the release of KDE 4.0.0, I made a decision to abandon KDE and move to GNOME as I felt that KDE 4 was not ready for my daily use production work machine and didn’t feel like staying on KDE 3.5.10 which wasn’t going to be maintained going forward. I switched to GNOME flawlessly and was working away like anyone else, but it felt like a dull and plain environment. It just wasn’t as polished as I remember KDE being.

With that said, I decided while testing openSUSE 11.2, to give KDE 4.3.1 (which will ship with openSUSE 11.2) a shot. With this decision I opted to also use its native compositing engine thus removing the requirement for Compiz (or is it Compiz++, or is it Compiz-Fusion, or is it… well yeah, you get the point). I must say after a few days of usage on a test workstation, I decided to switch from GNOME to KDE on my Production daily use machine for work.

I had a pretty negative outlook, and feeling about KDE 4 after some initial tests in the 4.0 and 4.1 life cycle, but let me tell any doubters, those outlooks have been flipped 100% and I’m glad to be back into the KDE game.

Some highlights that stood out for me were:
* Snappiness (Yes, everything seemed to be much faster then GNOME, not to mention the native compositing seems to work very well, I’ll write more on getting KDE Compositing configured like Compiz later).
* Plasmoids and Plasma are MUCH more mature (Back in the days of 4.0.0, Plasma to me wasn’t ready for the prime time, and 90% of my crashes / oddities revolved around Plasma. Although plasma isn’t 100% and it can use some improvements, I have yet *knock on wood* experienced a crash).
* Amarok is usable again. (For anyone that used Amarok 2.0, you were in the same boat as me.. it sucked, but with the release of 2.2 it has sure come a long way).
* Dolphin has been cleaned up, and is much more feature full.. YAY

Some negatives that stood out for me were:
* We need a KDE Browser, that’s native and well works. (Yes.. I know there is rekonq, but until it’s dubbed as the default KDE Browser then I think this negative still exists)
* The default window decoration is very very clunky. This was easily fixed with the addition of the nitrogen theme, which Will Stephenson believes was merged upstream with oxygen. If you want the rpm it’s in the following repository
* * This is VERY NIT PICKY .. application’s have yet to convert their sys tray icons to the new tray icon protocol and abandon the obsoleted XEMBED.

I would like to say great job KDE team, keep up the great work and keep listening to the “users” as that’s how you’ve been able to push KDE 4.x to be as great as it is. By the time it hits 4.5, it’ll blow KDE 3.5 way out of the water in both functionality, stability and speed.

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