Finally! After long waiting KDE 4.1 was released. After very bad experiences with KDE 4.0, I decided to see what has improved.
For whole week I tried to use KDE 4.1 instead of KDE 3.5.9, and conclusion is quick.
Conclusion for KDE 4.1:
- KDE 4.1 is still very slow and unstable. Like snail crawling in a tarpit. When compared to it, KDE 3.5.9 is running fast like happy bunny rabit
- Desktop folder thing is a joke. First there was those fancy ”plasmoids” in KDE 4.0 in the desktop and well, they were not working at all. Now there is concept called ”Desktop Folder”. Which is Extremely slow and ackward way of trying to manage some files in desktop
So in may ways KDE 4 is step backwards. In KDE 3 series great steps in improved performance were gradually created. KDE 4 seems to go different direction; becoming slower.
One sample example, from the slowness of KDE4: In KDE 3.5.9 when you switched from one virtual desktop to another, it takes around 0.01 seconds. In KDE 4.x it has been improved to take over 2 seconds! Than can be hardly described as improvement.
Yes, I had to switch back to KDE 3.5.9, KDE 4.1 is too far from usable. And did I remember to mention, that it’s slow, ugly, unusable and unstable.
And still, sadly, this ”Dolphin” file manager is not very functional. It is still slow and ackward to use. Old konqueror based filemanager was rather good in file management (okey, it had some bugs, but compared to Dolphin they are nothing). And no, KDE 4.1 doesn’t seem to anylonger this good old konqueror, which is too sad.
For example, in old Konqueror it was dead easy to create custom ”Open With” targets for file types. In Dolphin this is seemingly impossible. In Dolphin you’ve to always manually browse for the script what you want to execute.