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A short review of my initial Heron experience with KDE4...

I have a multi-boot system with an extra partition I use for testing new versions, so I installed it to that.

I used the alternate install... kubuntu-kde4-8.04-alternate-i386.iso I have never seen the liveCD work on this home-built system so I didn't try it.

Specs: Asus A8V / Athlon 64 3200+ / GeForce 6200TD 128M AGP / SATA and PATA drives

VIDEO
The install went smoothly. After reboot, I got to a garbled screen. This was a predictable result with my NVidia card - all kubuntu installs have booted to a blank or garbled screen. I fixed it with the following procedure:
Ctrl-Alt F1, login, and...


I think it installed these, either that or they were already there. (The console scrolling was messed up so I couldn't see what was happening.)

I then copied my xorg.conf from feisty (which uses the "nvidia" driver) to heron and rebooted - X appeared to be working flawlessly.

UPDATE
I did an update (adept notifier) of 35 packages without issue.

OVERALL
My overall impression was that KDE had been dumbed down to gnome-like simplicity and wasted real estate, and I found it annoying. In general, very few options in most setting screens. This could be due to the work-in-progress status - I hope so. I'm not an Apple user.

The screen looked neat and the desktop generally worked well, but there were curious errors and hiccups - I thought 'not ready for business'. Unfortunately K/Ubuntu and KDE seems to be following the Microsoft model - rush things out before they're even beta ready. This is not post-beta work. The developers just need to use it themselves for awhile instead of waiting for beta-testers to point out rudimentary errors.

FILE MANAGER
I was disappointed with the new default file manager Dolphin. Main drawback there was no tabs. A split-view is not enough for me. In general it looked a little too fluffy - wasted real estate in the window and limited configurability.

I decided to get Konqueror into file management mode. I set up some tabs with folder views, etc. and saved the File Management view profile. However, when I tried to load that view profile it crashed. It also crashed when I tried to load it from the command line. Hence, the File Manager mode of Konqueror is currently unusable on the system. (The Midnight Commander view profile also crashed, even though I never modified it.)

MENU
Not sure I like the new application kicker menu - again, fluffy and slow to navigate. But perhaps I could get used to it. But there was no link to edit the menu. I had to start kmenuedit from a terminal (no way to Run... from a menu that I could find). I then added a menu item for kmenuedit, and that program seemed to work okay.

FIREFOX
I installed firefox using Adept. It installed okay, but no menu item for it appeared. I started kmenuedit, clicked Save, and then the Firefox menu item appeared, so apparently the menu was not refreshed after the install. My brief use of Firefox was successful. (It installs a beta version of Firefox 3.)

SYSTEM SETTINGS
These seemed really sparse. I wanted to check my boot partition but there was no 'Disks and Filesystems'. I had to run cfdisk. Maybe it's just not done yet.

WORKING CONCLUSION
Thus far I'm not sure I will continue with KDE 4.0. a) It is not ready for business in that it produces errors and hiccups when you're trying to work with it, even in the most basic tasks. b) There are too many missing tools and system settings from what I could see. c) The ability to customize KDE is very limited - might as well use Gnome. I hope this changes, or I suspect KDE3 is going to have a longer life than expected.

On the plus side, it ran, and it seemed decently fast and well organized. I would say the developers have a good base. It needs to be fleshed out with much more user configurability, and it needs to be cleaned of bugs (without relying on the slow bug-reporting process - do some thorough testing on your work yourself before passing it to beta-testers - it's much faster that way.)


All of that said, my thanks to the developers who continue to work on KDE.