Impressions of kde-4.1

[Manolis Kiagias]

David Gurvich wrote:
> I've installed the kde4 packages for freebsd-7-stable and the only
> program that I've tested that doesn't work is konqueror, that has
> problems with speed and stability, terminal emulator does not work,
> and leaves zombie processing to take up memory.  I noticed 10 konqueror
> processes after having closed the last konqueror window about 20
> minutes before.
>
> Has anyone noticed that the longer kde4 runs the slower it gets?  I
> don't mean a little slower, I mean like the difference between
> windowmaker and kde startup.  That may have something to do with the
> machine I've done this on, a thinkpad T23 with 1GB ram.
>   

My KDE4.1 has been up for a few days now, and I have not really noticed 
it getting slower. It definitely is slower than any other desktop I've 
tried, and certainly slower than KDE3.5. I have some issues with Nvidia 
driver and  transparency (sometimes parts of the taskbar, mostly 
buttons, become transparent), it is not very serious problem though. I 
had no crashes and it is certainly usable. The machine is no speed 
daemon either; an Athlon 64 3200+ with 2G of RAM and a 7300GT that just 
about manages the 1680x1050 resolution in KDE4.
> Finally, kde4 looks nice but I don't see anything I would change from
> kde3 for, though fonts do look better to me than in kde3.

Strange, every machine that I installed KDE4 I had to tweak font 
settings to get them to look good. Never had to do this with 3.5 (though 
I had to do it with GNOME)

>   This may
> change if the speed improves.  If all other aspects are equal I like
> having better looking desktop.
>
>   

Yes, I think KDE4.x is a step in the right direction for the KDE 
desktop. It may have its problems now, but it definitely looks nice.

As a sidenote, I uploaded (and currently seeding) a torrent with KDE 4.1 
packages and an installer script (intended for new FreeBSD installs) here:

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=c08d546327215f32f566f6d215ba30fff952692c

(also on tuxdistro, but this seems to have a problem at the moment)

I built all the packages on a dedicated machine. Newer versions of xorg, 
bash, samba and a few others are also included.