Digested

I spend most of my time at my desktop in few apps. Konqueror, KDevelop, KMail, Konversation for irc, Konsole, Amarok. Throw in a video player, usually mplayer. On my Eeepc, Vim in Konsole as editor, Konqueror. The hardware integration is important in both, using the media capabilities of Solid for mounting SD cards and backup partitions.

I loaded KMail (svn revision 794573), set up the accounts, and everything worked as expected. Essentially the same experience as KDE 3.5, at least from a cursory examination. The existing setup for spam and filters worked as expected. I'm very interested in exploring Akanodi.

Konsole has changed quite a bit. The configuration is simplified, although accessing the configuration is a matter of trying menu items until something useful shows up. The configuration dialog didn't size to the Eeepc screen and required the alt-leftmousebutton treatment to get to the OK button. One thing I miss is the button for creating a new tab. It was the most used control element in Konsole 3.5x. At least for me.

I loaded KDevelop from svn. It didn't recognize my existing projects. There may be a feature that does, but I didn't run across it. I didn't get very far in the testing as it crashed. I'll do a bit more testing to see if it's ready to use.

Oh, I didn't mention that Qt4.4RC1 is installed.

I used the Suse Kickoff menu for a while. I liked it, especially the easily available search capabilities, and the favorites. Kdemod had a setup which included Kickoff and beagle, but it is no longer maintained. I was forced kicking and screaming back into the old KMenu, which is painfully broken. The new menu setup in KDE4 is in some ways better than Kickoff. The search works well, Favorites is nice, the hierarchical menu setup works well. The difficult to control mousing in Kickoff is much better in KDE4. There seem to be two types of people. Those who like it and those who don't. One thing I really liked about Kickoff is the access to beagle search. I'm not sure if KDE4 menu (whatever it is called) does, at least here it doesn't return any results. I'm hoping Strigi ends up better than beagle. It is somewhat disconcerting when the beagle indexes are bigger than the indexed data. I ended up disabling it for that reason.