I am using KDE since switched from Duron 600 to Athlon XP (few years ago). IIRC it was 3.1.something then. It was nice improvement from my desktop built on ROX-Filer + gnome-panel and WindowMaker. Time passed, my machines got faster and faster, 3D hardware acceleration was added with NVidia cards and then KDE 4 started to appear…
I installed KDE 4 on my desktop and tried to use it for few months. First it was 4.0.x but I upgraded to 4.1-svn packages when they started to be available for Debian. Ideas which KDE team has are nice but usability of such desktop is much worse then KDE 3.5.9 one :( Too much bling, too less features so I “upgraded” back to 3.5.9 to get nicely working system.
What did I lose with KDE 4.1 (tried final release yesterday):
- fast desktop switching (if there is Konsole open on desktop it will render for long time)
- fast Konsole tab switching (I have 2-8 tabs in terminal)
- ability to set/move panel at any edge of screen (now I use top panel, used more)
- ability to reorder applets/plasmoids in panel (ops - there is a way but not as intuitive as it was in 3.5)
- Klipper is not usable (crash on nearly each use, not launching browser)
From what I read on KDE website Konsole problems are related to NVidia cards and workaround is given. I wonder why there is no check in preferences “I have NVidia — do not use ARGB windows then” or other way. I think that it should be easy to check with few function calls which OpenGL libs are in use…
Looks like now I have to wait to 2009 for KDE 4.2 and then check does it behave or not. Or maybe it is time to check XFCE or other environment?