I’ve been using KDE 4.2 as daily desktop environment since beginning of February and for me it has been a huge improvement over the initial KDE releases. There were some small issues between minor-updates but overall everything was quite stable and ok.

Today Arch Linux updated the KDE desktop packages to 4.3 and I’m really really impressed.

Everything feels snappier, loads and renders faster. Konqueror displays sites WAY faster. Kwin also leaves a better impression. Here and there some eye candy got added, but always in non distracting ways. Generally, the desktop elements feel more mature and are kept out of my way (e.g the notification messages).

The few rendering issues I had in the past (the “ExaOptimizeMigration” stuff) disappeared as well.

Great release!

Adding emacs 23 released last week, I’m really pleased with my current desktop.

2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010: The year of the linux desktop ;)

Today a new version of the KDE desktop got released. My impression (gentoo overlay):

• They sticked to their configurability-style. The new applications I saw are flexible and very customizable. You can do whatever you want.
• Ugly
• Some MacOS inspired like features with the functionality of exposé and dashboard
• Lot’s of white space wasted in core apps like in the new file browser (But hey, thats ok with me, my screens are big enough)
• Most of the KDE folks are talking about really great API improvements. Lets hope this will also result in great applications. Also the gpl’ed availability of QT on MacOS and Windows may turn into an interesting thing.
• Fast and not hogging resources.

Basically I’m happy that a new beta version got released and looking forward to 4.1. Not because I’m a kfan, no, mainly because I don’t like Gnome and how it gets adopted everywhere I go. KDE is my last hope being saved from too chocolaty or orangy interfaces. An absolute dominance of one major desktop environment may be a good thing on the one hand because of the gigantic amount of redundancy those two players generated in the past. However, on the other hand, being forced into their brain dead simplicity system where you can’t change nothing because it might confuse the mythical “average user” would be true horror for me. Simplicity is certainly a good thing, but they don’t achieve a sane balance of usability and functionality like for example e17 or MacOS does where the benefit created by the simplicity outweighs the missing configuration possibilities.

My editor is my window manager anyway and as long as I can full screen terminals the linux desktop experience will be all right for me.