Recent Experience with KDE4 on Mandriva 2008

I'm a KDE lover and I tried various distros recently. After trying Fedora, Ubuntu and other GNOME based distro I'm stuck to PCLOS. Reason it uses KDE and PCLOS team has done a very nice job to make it look good and faster than other distro. Well I'm not going to compare distros here. I'm here to give you my latest experience with the KDE4.

I was (and still I'm) very exited about the major release of KDE4 but no distro is daring to use it because it is full of bugs. Recently I saw that Mandriva 2008 has added KDE4 in its repository and I decided to download Mandriva 2008. Because I love PCLOS, I like Mandriva too. Mandriva 2008 uses KDE 3.5 and Mandriva team has done a good job to improve its graphics and features. But here my intention was to try KDE4 so I downloaded using URPMI (Mandriva uses URPMI like PCLOS uses Synaptic for package management). There is a package called task-kde4 once you select it it selects all its dependencies, which is 228 mb package. As I've already done same kind of thing on PCLOS and tried task-xfce package for XFCE desktop, I was expecting that existing menu items will be there but I was surprised to see that existing menu items are not available.

As you know Mandriva and PCLOS has fastest bootup with KDE, I figured it out that KDE 4 has giving more speed to it and compare to 3.5 it starts few second early. I was also disappointed to see there is no system tray by default. Now when there is no system tray means no KnetworkManager or NetApplet to monitor the network. After surfing a bit I found there is a hidden menu on upper left corner and you can select various applets that will appear on your desktop, some of them imitates MS Vista, which is actually good. It may attract new Vista users. I felt graphics and smoothness is better than 3.5 .

I was disappointed because Mandriva has not put any effort to make KDE4 usable, I didn't find any application that I use frequently to test its speed after loading several programs. This package downloads KOffice which I don't find usable for me. There is one more issue I found when I tried to restart the system and tried to log in using KDE4 directly, it was not able to initiate couple of services and leaving me back to the log-in screen. Again I feel that it is something that is Mandriva's responsibility to take care off.

Conclusion is, my experience with KDE4 was not good, but I felt that if distros like PCLOS give more attention to it in there next release cycle it will definitely boost up performance and look of the distro. Even though my current experience is not good, I'm giving a warmth welcome to this release and expecting that it will change user experience of linux. I also wish that Textar and Team must take a look and of it and if possible try to become first distro with KDE4. Best of Luck to Textar and KDE team.