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Bango! I "get back" from being out of touch [for the most part] for 9 days due to an emergency video-card replacement. . . and the first time I run pacman -Syu, I get 414MB of KDE updates. . .

So my Arch is now KDE 4.1 flavoured.

Well! I have to admit that a lot of it is really pretty, and some nice functionality. It's also gone spazz on me four times in the course of the day. Rebooted or restarted X-server three time, and had to do a hardware reset once. Even "Raising Elephants. . ." didn't unfreeze it that time.


Anyone else doing Arch with KDE 4.1?
???

Just back from holiday myself and catching up with the Arch etc news. Quite amazed that KDE 4.1 has become standard in Arch already; as you'll read from the Arch forums many "productive" (ie. real work!) users are not best pleased that KDE 3.5.9 has been dropped so dramatically.

There is no way I'm doing a "pacman -Syu" without several days' deliberation about the way forward for my own systems. I might make an rsync clone of my working partition to another spare one and experiment with upgrading that. But there again, I have no compelling reason to upgrade anything at the moment as everything is running just dandy with KDE 3.5.9! Also, I tried KDE4 with a recent Suse 11.0 DVD and it was pretty awful in all sorts of ways, though Suse are meant to have put lots of work into making KDE4 usable.

I'm more hacked off with the KDE developers than I am with the Arch developers, because the former seem to have followed their own selfish indulgences first, and then paid lip service to users' transitional agonies in the real world. The Arch guys have probably done the best they can with a horrible situation: KDE4 is here to stay and KDE3 will rapidly start to wither.

Mumble, rant, mumble, rant ... I'll let you know what I decide later.

Well, I did as I threatened and rsync'ed my entire working Arch partition to another spare one. Then I did the grand 'pacman -Syu' which installed no less than 600MB of upgrades, about half of which concerned the upgrade to KDE 4.1. The process was surprisingly fast and painless, and all credit to the Arch developers for that.

However, after spending some hours trying to work seriously with KDE 4.1, I'm totally scunnered with it. I'm not going to waste my time further detailing the problems and omissions; there are so many, and handfuls of showstoppers too. KDE 4.1 provides nowhere near the functionality and reliability of KDE 3.5.9, and should never have been unleashed so soon on Arch users as the default KDE. I seriously wonder whether KDE 4 will be useful this year at all.

Where do I go from here? Stick with Arch + KDE 3.5.9 and never do an upgrade? Abandon KDE for the slow-but-sure Gnome (which I've really never liked)? Try again with KDE 4.3 or 4.4 next year or whenever ... ?!

Life is too short for this kind of nonsense!