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The initial install went smoothly by downloading the basic libraries and installing them. That was the best part.
After shutting down X and attempting to restart, I found my NVIDIA driver broken ... I think. The shutdown itself never seemed to complete. The first thing I noticed -- because it was so obvious -- was a constant cycling between the GUI and the CLI as the shutdown process continued, which was apparent due to the rapid change between a black screen with nothing and a black screen with a timer icon on it, in addition to the regular clicking of the relay in my monitor. I couldn't stop this process using any method and eventually had to hit RESET. This is the first time I have ever had to use a RESET on a Linux system.
I tried rebooting, but that didn't work, so I opted for the FailSafe system I have in my GRUB menu and, as a guess, uninstalled the graphics driver, then reinstalled it. Upon reboot, I was able to login normally.
When I was finally able to bring up KDE I was greeted with a pleasant splash screen with a polished look, suggesting I was going to be using a relatively polished product. The sound scheme is also different and, I think, a bit better ... or maybe I'm just being impressed by newness at the moment.
When the desktop came up, the splash screen didn't disappear as it should have. Strangely I was able to grab it with the mouse pointer and move it around but not get rid of it. It did eventually go away on its own as the desktop itself sluggishly came online.
That desktop is pretty, and I think I'll like it as a base from which to work to make it look the way I want, but at present, I can't really do that. Few of the components I use for customization have KDE 4 compatible equivalents, and those that do are buggy. Similarly, simply trying to change the theme from the default seems to have problems. A much appreciated addition to the behavior of KDE 4 -- or one that will be appreciated when it works properly -- is on-the-fly updating of the visuals when a selection is chosen, but without applying it, thus allowing you to see what your choice will do when you hit APPLY. I selected one of the themes, waited half a second for the window to redraw to show me the preview, and the window for customizing these settings didn't resize properly, removing my ability to click any buttons to close the window. I eventually figured out I could click on odd places on the screen where nothing appeared, and the underlying system interpreted this spot to be where some clickable button was, and I could do things that way, but I wasn't sure what I was doing when I did it. I never could find the close button. In addition, the functionality of the kicker went away, and I couldn't pull up a terminal to close the System Settings application from the CLI. After clicking randomly for awhile, everything seemed to shutdown. I could move the pointer around anywhere, but I couldn't click on anything. It was as though someone had taken a screenshot of a working desktop, removed all the icons and closed all the windows, and then used the screenshot as my wallpaper.
Frustrated by this point, I opted for Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X and login again, and that's when the problems really started.
The kwin and ksmserver apps didn't shut down and were *both* pegged at 100% CPU usage, sometimes going up to 101% according to top. They were "nice" enough to allow other apps to take CPU usage when they requested it, but the whole shebang was afterward impossible to use. Everything reacted like I was running Windows VISTA on a Pentium 2. So, I shut down KDE 4 and went back to my KDE 3.5 desktop. Everything seemed normal, except the sluggishness remained. I checked top and found that neither kwin nor ksmserver had shutdown and were still pegged at 100%. I had to kill them manually to get them to go away.
I've since shutdown and logged in using KDE 4 several times now and have not had that problem again, but it was irritating enough for me not to bother at this point. Certainly a similar problem will arise at some critical juncture, if not that precise one.
I will say the fonts in KDE 4 are more polished. The oxygen theme and icon set are nice. The color schemes aren't all that great and the lack of my ability to customize the way I did with KDE 3.5 is a killer right now. Icons on the desktop highlight with shadowed halo around them that has clickable options like "properties" when you hover over them, but the shadow doesn't always go away when your pointer leaves, and even when it does, the icons keep a darker shade around them than the desktop underneath, as though they are selected, preventing the blending effect of icons on the desktop I prefer. I want the little quarter-moon in the top right-hand corner that lets me choose desktop widgets to go away, but it won't, and I want this BIG FUCKING CLOCK on the kicker bar to be smaller, but there's no option to do that currently.
Dolphin is the new file manager, and it's ok, a good platform from which to build. It doesn't look a whole lot different from Konqueror upon first glance, but a lot of things are, which is natural since it is a completely different application. I applaud getting away from using a web browser as a file manager, but dolphin, as a dedicated file manager, currently has a lot of maturing to do before it reaches the functionality that various hacks had placed into Konqueror over the years.
It'll be nice eventually, but it's obviously a BETA, still some way from a release candidate.
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