I installed KDE4 the other night.  Kubuntu will install it alongside 3, so as there was no risk of me destroying anything important I thought I may as well (plus I have loads of java and software engineering work that needs avoiding...)

Anyway, it lasted about 7 minutes before I angrily removed it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like KDE.  Mainly because it works, and I've got it customised to (almost) exactly what I want from my desktop.

But 4.. hmmm.  let's make a list:

•  Sound.  It made noises.  Lots of noises.  Some kind of fanfare on startup (and probably logout but it crashed then so who knows), and even worse, a very quiet yet incredibly irritatating "spoiiiing" noise whenever I moved a window, or did pretty much anything. grr
  And I couldn't find any way of turning the sound off.  Not good.
  
• K Menu (start menu).  Rather than the usual 'programs list', it's more like the vista start menu - recently used stuff, with icons at the bottom for other menus.  Which is fair enough, but they change on hover rather than click.  Very annoying.  Apparently you can change it to get the old-style menu instead, but I couldn't find that option anywhere.
• Everything's huge!  Especially the clock - and there's no way of changing its font size. 
  
• Widgets widgets widgets.  Everything's a bloody desktop widget.  Overkill much?
• Customisation.  Like I said, I like being able to fiddle with stuff.  Meaning that I get quite frustrated when I can't find the right menu option (or whatever) to change things.  Or even worse, I find the settings and discover that actually, I can't change certain things!
• No integration of themes with GTK apps. Firefox loaded up looking fucking ugly, which made me angry.

If I'd used it for more time, I could probably add to this list (or could have found fixes for some of the above). I know it's only a recent release, and especially as a ubuntu package, so obviously it's not all going to work perfectly, but ewww.  Hopefully some of these 'issues' will vanish with future releases.

Did look quite nice though.  In a trendy, 'shiny' web2.0/mac kind of way... 

tags: linux