KDE 4.2 is set for release on January 27th.  Eager to see what is new and improved, I installed beta 1 on my Gentoo box.  KDE 4.1.80 was tagged then released late last month after the feature freeze deadline. This is a snapshot of the current development tree that will eventually be released as KDE 4.2.

A quick blurb about KDE 4.1:
Busy with other things, I never wrote about KDE 4.1 on Gentoo. I’ve been using KDE 4.1 since 4.1.1 with the kde-testing overlay which has since entered portage and been bumped to 4.1.3. This is a good release and well worth at least testing if you are a KDE user. I’ve found it to be quite stable and use it exclusively for every day work.  The Gentoo KDE team has done an excellent job creating ebuilds for it.

What’s new?

Plasma received a lot of polish and is beginning to eclipse Kicker and indeed all other desktop and panels that I have used.  Much needed features such as changing the panel height, auto-hide, and screen edge selection have been added.  The task bar is highly configurable in typical KDE fashion, allowing you to define task grouping, sorting, filtering based on current desktop or screen or minimized windows only, as well as allowing manual grouping.  The system tray also now allows hiding of unwanted tray icons.

Here’s a screen shot cluttered with various plasmoids for demonstration.  It’s nice to see the community thinking up some fun and useful plasmoids.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the KDE 4 default menu.  Luckily, the Lancelot menu has been accepted upstream and is now an option on stock installs.  This menu is great for finding new applications (esp. new users) as well as thumbing through with the keyboard.

I’m a Firefox user, but occasionally will fire up other browsers for testing or to avoid restoring a large previous session if I am in a hurry.  I’m happy to say that Konqueror feels much faster.  It also seems to work much better on AJAX heavy sites such as Facebook.  When I spoofed the user agent to report Firefox 2, Facebook chat worked fine, an improvement from 4.1.  The continued merging of Webkit is clearly beneficial here.

One of my favorite KDE apps from 3.5, Ark, is also finally reaching feature parity.  I missed shell integration with Dolphin/Konqueror quite a bit and am happy to say it has returned.

Notifications are displayed and stack nicely in the lower right corner.  Operations such as downloading and moving files will show their status here.

Kontact gained usenet support by means of Akonadi, which now has support many for data sources.  I think I will switch from Thunderbird/Lightning to Kontact with this release.

Kate has a new VI editing mode.  This is quite a nice text editor.

Amarok is shaping up as well.  This is 2.0 RC1, so it should be released on a date close to KDE 4.2.  Take a look at the different Internet media sources.  Last.fm support is now top notch!

Digikam 0.10-beta5, which seems to be stabilizing and evolving nicely, is another nice app.  Bonus points if you can identify all the retro machines.  The one on the left was probably the worlds first “green” PC.

Okteta, an easy to use hex editior, has also been updated.

I could go on and on showing the great progress.  I hope I hit the highlights, but you can check out the feature plan for yourself here: http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.2_Feature_Plan.  Noteworthy changes include improved multi-display, better desktop search with Strigi, and integrated power management.

Gentoo Installation

First, a shout out to the Gentoo KDE maintainers and testers.  Creating ebuilds for fast moving snapshots and live sources for a project this large is not an easy task.

Installation on Gentoo is fairly easy if you have layman.  ‘layman -a kde-crazy’ will add the KDE crazy overlay which has KDE 4.2 unmasked and ready for testing.  If your box is ~arch, it should be as simple as ‘emerge -av @kde-4.2′ (see comments below for more info).  I recommend using the kdeprefix USE flag if you wish to test development releases so you can fall back to stable if things aren’t working correctly.  This will slot 4.x releases.

If you want a stable and usable environment, I still recommend sticking to 4.1.3 at the moment.  If you run a mostly stable Gentoo with KDE3.5, you can find a package.keywords file in the kde-testing overlay as well as some other minor goodies.  These versions slot effortlessly so it isn’t a problem switching back and forth.

Conclusions

KDE 4.2 has come a long way since 4.0 and is a nice steady improvement over 4.1.  As I stated earlier, I use KDE 4.1.3 as my only desktop environment and am extremely pleased with it.  I have had no major issues and have had uptime of over a month in the past without crashing/restarting KDE – so the good old KDE 3.5 stability seems to be returning.  By trying the current beta out, I have no doubt that 4.2 should be just as stable by release.

Also, if you are an Nvidia user you owe it to yourself to try the latest 180.xx+ drivers.  As people have long been saying, much of the performance problems they were describing were related to Nvidia cards and poor video drivers.  With the new drivers, KDE is lightning fast.

Here’s to an on time and successful KDE 4.2 release.  I can’t wait to see what QT 4.5 and KDE 4.3 will bring!

So I bit the bullet and installed KDE 4.0 on Gentoo. Version 4.0.4 recently hit the tree, and with some minor hackary to package.unmask and package.keywords I have a nice spartan KDE 4.0.4 desktop that I am typing this in.

My observations:

Like Gentoo’s KDE3 packaging, you are given KDE4 pretty much as it is packaged upstream. It certainly lacks the polish that Fedora 9 and OpenSUSE 11 have been able to apply.

The desktop is somewhat of an afterthought at this point. Basic icon grid alignment and drag selection don’t work. Icons on the desktop are treated as widgets which means you can rotate them and such which may be something to build on in the future. However this area basically needs work.

Oxygen is beautiful. Seriously, everything looks stunning and it does not get in the way. Its not gaudy. Very professional. Still room for improvement though, I.E. icon set isn’t complete, consistency.

kwin’s built in composting is awesome. This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for. It doesn’t have the heavy weight and gaudy appearance of Compiz or Vista. This will be a major productivity boost. Tabbing through windows, expose-zoom overview, and a heads-up of virtual desktops are the things I will use. The light shadowing and animation are also refreshing and professional. Nothing to get in the way here, it is stable and speedy.

The application launcher is a major pain in the ass. The integrated search is handy, but it just takes too many damn clicks to find an app otherwise. This will be especially unwelcome by new users since you might not know if the app you want is in ‘Internet’ or ‘Development’ or ‘Multimedia’ or even ‘More Applications’ under any of these. Every time you click the menu it starts from the favorites pane and does not remember the category you were in. I don’t think the Windows 95 style start menu is the final or best UI answer, but it beats this Vista style menu and the OS X dock abomination hands down.

Basically, plasma as a whole needs work. Widgets seem pretty glitchy. Also responsible for the above desktop nuances.

Apps are hit or miss. Gwenview is great for thumbing through pictures. okular does the same for documents. Dolphin works very well for most tasks, while Konqueror is there for you otherwise. Many of the games have been updated and are pretty good. Marble, Kalzium – just plain cool. Ark was one of my unsung heros on KDE3. It is severely lacking in KDE 4.0. I hope that it gets some attention, and shell integration back too! A lot of other utilities are either absent or need work as well.

Amarok 2 has yet to be released, but this will be a major influence when it is.

Speed! KDE4 is quick. This is a welcome relief. Once KDE4 starts to gel, I’d imagine it will run at least as well as KDE3 on old hardware. Build speed was much quicker with cmake, which is very welcome on Gentoo.

Stability is much improved in this release. It still is not business-grade. Trivial apps seem to crash on exit and such.

The Weird? The default window size for just about everything seems unnecessarily small. I find myself having to resize pretty much everything before I can use it.

In conclusion, KDE 4.0 is a giant leap forward but it is a work in progress…

If you are migrating from KDE3 on an old install, best wait as there is some adjustment. KDE 4.0 as packaged in Fedora 9 and OpenSUSE 11 seem quite usable however. I wouldn’t hesitate to install them on a new PC. I will certainly keep KDE 4.0 installed and re-evaluate with 4.1, but KDE3 has a better work flow for my use at the moment.

It reminds me a lot of Apple’s OS 9 to OS X transition. I’ve been following the development for some time. From the alphas, betas, and release in January, I’m quite surprised by where we are at today. Things are much better than they were just six short months ago. A lot of work has taken place and we are really forging the foundation for a first rate competitor in the PC desktop arena for the next 10 years. KDE 4.1 should be be released near the end of the summer. I believe it will be enough to convert many KDE3 users over. Things should really calm down and align by 4.2 and it will no doubt in my mind be the best desktop environment whatsoever at this point.