As my sound dropped out for some reason I started changing and updating a lot of things and ended up with KDE 4.3
So now after having it in use for a few days I thought I’d share my findings.
The Good
Using a multi-monitor setup on one location in 4.2 led to crashes, it doesn’t do that anymore.
It will simply squeeze the 2 monitor content on one. Although it’s not perfect… it’s a huge improvent upon 4.2 “Plasma workspace has crashed”.
To give an example of why it isn’t perfect (yet), the sticky notes plasmoid is displayed outside the visible part of my screen (going from 1680x1050 + 1920x1200 to 1680*1050).
And when hooking up the 1920x1200 display again although the plasmoids are moved tot the proper display, their alignment is off for one monitor and the bottom panel falls a bit short.
Customizable icon for the launcher - Woohoo
been waiting for this one, used lancelot for this purpose before while I liked the normal menu better.Now I can have my customizable icon AND the normal launcher menu.
Fancy new effect for launcher when opening, eyecandy
Analog clock addon seems to downscale better though that’s probably thanks to my plasma theme
Something changed about the changelist, it looks better with multiple rows and no longer locks up randomly for me anymore.
Some other multi-display oddities seem to be fixed
The Bad
It’s quite unstable for me, knotify causes plasma to crash. Turn it off for where it’s commonly used (In my case KMess) and it’s not too bad.
At least nothing to complain about when running beta software.
alt+f2 to restart plasma no longer works… that’s nerve wrecking combined with knotify crashing plasma (and sometimes not automically restarting it after).
Amarok 2 wont install without downgrading half the install - Probably myself to blame for not setting up the repositories properly
Verdict
Certainly a beta, don’t upgrade to it if you value a stable system. But it sure looks like they added some nice polish to it (like the customisable launcher icon) and are busy with small improvements all over the place.
Although it doesn’t feel like a change as big as 4.1 to 4.0 or from 4.1 to 4.2 it still is yet another step closer to a perfect desktop.
I was quite happy with 4.2, but the little extra’s in 4.3 are ones that I value.
Thanks for posting this. I was wondering if anyone was trying it out. I can’t afford to risk it myself, at least not at the moment. I just have too many admin jobs needing my laptop working and setup. I have tried it in VBox mind you but that was some months ago. It was just about usable then. Did you add the QT45?
what I ended up with is:
4.2.68(KDE 4.2.68 (KDE 4.3 >= 20090327)) “release 1.2”
up to now all is well (music, burning cd dvd, skype, ff, email, oo, scanner etc) … except … that from time to time Dolphin is melting down (literally)… very weird
Just upgraded and am now at openSUSE 11.1 KDE 4.2.68 (KDE 4.2.68 (KDE 4.3 >= 20090327)) “release 1.2” on my extra 80 gig HD. Anyways, some problems I saw were that when you change the Desktop Settings like wallpaper and theme you can’t hit apply, you can only click ok.
Another thing is, now that QT 4.5 is being used, Konqueror and sysinfo:/ no longer work (was having this problem when using qt4.5 with kde greater than 4.2.1 “104” and kde 4.2.2).
Plasma crashes when I choose to restart or shut down.
KDE4-K3b still doesn’t recognize I have the .mp3 audio decoder plugin installed. It also won’t rip a dvd, but instead decides I’m asking to burn a DVD. (Kde3/k3b doesn’t work with current version of transcode so dvd ripping must be done with another application). So other than that all is well for me.
I love the customizable menu icon! Before I had to switch the start-here-branding.svg image manually and anytime opensuse-branding-workspace (or something like that) upgraded, it would revert it back to the lizzard icon.
Ah thanks a ton, would have expected the alt+f2 dialog to at least display the proper one after typing in plasma.
Few other things I’ve noticed that are new:
Dolphins ‘preview’ view now also display previews of files IN folders, much like explorer does in windows. Can’t say I dig the looks though.
Changing the desktop wallpaper is done by fading in the new one… and the desktop settings window seems to be slightly bugged. Can’t apply changes, have to hit OK instead… apply stays grayed out.
Network manager / Plasmoid seem to have matured a bit… though the ‘graphical’ display of available networks is still a mess.
You can have a different background on each of your desktops
right click on the desktop caret and zoom out
at the right there is a menu box and at the bottom is a square to
check. the text is different activity for each desktop check it and viola you can set different backgrounds etc for each desktop Picasa Web Albums - dale - SUSE screen s… the link is an example
KDE 4.3 is shaping up quite nicely. There’s definitely more ‘pop’ in KWin, optimisation has paid off.
KRunner is better, it’s been nice to use the improved implemenation Aaron Seigo wrote about on his blog.
The problem with Amarok downgrading packages is resolvable. It does bring up the conflict screen when you select Amarok…but that’s because it has selected Amarok from the wrong repository. If you manually select the Build Service repo in the “Versions” tab, you can have Amarok 2 on KDE 4.3.
Axeia is right, it’s not as dramatic an improvement as 4.1 or 4.2 were. But that’s allowed for more polish and finetuning rather than implementing major features. It also appears the KDE universe of apps will be much closer to being complete when it comes to porting. KOffice has hit release candidate status, K3B is getting support from Mandriva and peripheral apps (well not peripheral for everyone…) are in progress: BasKet, Konversation, Kile etc.
Hey Axeia, you’re certainly tempting me to make the plunge and upgrade to 4.3; I’m just wondering what sort of stability or lack thereof to expect; I was running 4.2 about six months before it was released-it was a rough ride, but tolerable; would you rate the current state of 4.3 to be about that level of quality?
Also, does 4.3 have any of that new systray spec that where all excited about a couple months ago? I heard that they were aiming at 4.3 for the new systray protocol, but I haven’t heard anything about it since.
Just thought it would be prudent to ask first… not that I am quite sure I have enough self-control to actually wait for an answer before diving in…
about half of the system tray spec was in the most recent build. I suspect all of it was submitted over the past few days, but when they built the lastest version from trunk it was not fully done. Of course even when it is fully built in the applications have to take advantage of it. So while 4.3 will see most of the coding done, 4.4 will most likely see the bulk of tweaks and applications taking advantage of the new system tray. Hopefully k3b gets finished up and someone jumps on the networking plasmoid and gives it the polish it needs. Then I can fully switch over to KDE 4 and by suse 11.2 be rid of all kde3 deps. And YaST will finally look nice.
