KDE 4.2: First Impressions

As you may already know, KDE4.2 was released a few days ago. I was interested in writing a plasmoid in python (more on that in a future post), which meant that I had to upgrade.

So what did I think of KDE4.2 after experiencing KDE4.1?

In a word: Brilliant!

KDE4.2 is a breath of fresh air after 4.1. Many of the crashes I experienced in KDE4.1 have been fixed. For example, in 4.1, every time I opened the "Display" configuration dialog my laptop would freeze, and needed to be hard rebooted in order to get it working again. Every time I launched a full-screen application (like a game) my laptop would freeze. I couldn't kill the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace without my laptop freezing... there's a whole list.

KDE4.2 fixes almost all these bugs, and even throws in some nice performance tweaks at the same time. Things feel more responsive - menus are faster to open, and some applications seem faster to load (although I haven't done any actual timing tests - so this is all subjective). Finally, it looks very nice:


It looks good, and it's responsive on my three year old laptop!

A big congratulations to all the KDE developers that made this happen. I believe I've committed a whopping 10 lines of code to KDE4, so I'm glad that other people have more commitment than I do ;)