fathi weblog

I don’t know if Peter tries KDE 4.1 beta1 (4.0.80) but I tend to disagree with some comments.

•  you can’t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

False. See the plasma icon on panel ? click on it and you’ll have what you want:

•  In general, there don’t appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.

Could be nice to be more verbose.

•  Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.

True, but it’s better with each release and not really a showstopper.

•  Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4

Which one do you want ?

•  Most applications don’t copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?

Indeed. KDE3 uses .kde as home directory and KDE4 uses .kde4. It is intended to not break your KDE3 until we test upgrade path.

• KMail doesn’t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn’t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn’t link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.

I don’t know I continue to use Kontact from KDE3. Modestas and Sune have switched to kde4pim and they found it better than expected.

• I couldn’t get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.

Hmm It works for me. Konsole saves maximized/normal state.

• I couldn’t add any application icons to the panel. I’m not sure where on is supposed to store one’s favorites now.

Make sure you unlock widgets with plasma icon on the top-right corner. Drag and drop from K-Menu to panel.

Sebas made a nice rough guide to plasma. Take a look !!!

•  So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

KDE4 is more than usable. It contains some glitches but we are far from sucide