I absolutely agree with you about the initial switch to KDE that 
kubuntu, as well as a number of other distros, did and if you went to 
Aaron Seigo's talk at ableconf a year and a half ago you would have 
heard his spit a lot of venom at a lot of the distros for adopting KDE4 
as their primary KDE desktop well before it had the official blessing 
from the KDE authors.  The way I see it is that they are both at fault 
because although the KDE people did say that 4.0 was only meant to be a 
preview release in order to get people developing for the new system 
they did give it a "dot oh" release which implies a certain amount of 
"doneness/readyness".

Fast forward to 2009 and you get a KDE release that actually has the 
blessing of the authors and it was pretty good, a little rough, but 
usable.  I still wouldn't blame someone for not dealing with the little 
bit of roughness... although I would have called 4.3 the 4.0 release.

These days with 4.6.1 it again feels like a complete, fast, stable, 
desktop.  And although it's a different system than the original, I 
don't feel feel like I'm using a completely different desktop than 3.5. 
  The defaults tend to use the new versions of things like the new 
fangled K menu, dolphin instead of konqueror...etc...etc, but they seem 
to have really gone out of their way to make available configurations 
that act exactly like the old KDE 3.5 versions of things... with that 
being said, I've forced myself to use a lot of the new stuff just to see 
why they decided to make the switch and for the most part I get it and 
tend to use the new stuff.  The new menu with it's quick search feature 
has me very rarely plowing through the various menus trying to find 
where a program is locations, and dolphin launches much more quickly 
than konqueror and makes me feel more like I'm using a file browser and 
less like I'm using a web browser, image viewer thingy that happens to 
also be a file browser.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is if it's been a while since you used 
KDE4, you should really give it another honest try.  It really doesn't 
resemble the steaming pile of crap that the first few releases acted like.

Brian Cluff

On 03/24/2011 08:23 AM, James Finstrom wrote:
> It was a dark stormy night in 2005. A stranger in a trench coat
> approached and handed me a CD. I no longer had to fight the benign
> little issues nor did I have to put any effort in to make my laptop run
> Linux. Alas I have been using derivatives of Ubuntu ever since. I used
> Kbuntu for years then they decided to move to KDE 4 which lacked my
> ability to like it. I switched over to gnome and we have become good
> friends. Ok lets get to the point. I am getting a new laptop today and I
> am debating of weather I should stick with Ubuntu who has never done me
> wrong or do I try something new.  I have no issues from a technical or
> moral standpoint with Ubuntu and am happy to use it until I do. That
> being said It has been almost 6 years and there have been many new
> distros born and old ones brought up to par so I would like feed back. I
> do wish to stay in the Debian family tree but outside of that I am open
> to suggestions.
>
> --
> James Finstrom
>
>
>
>
>
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