psycho$hell

I have been using KDE 4 from the Kubuntu repositories on their website for about a week now. I have not yet discovered it's potential although I think it will be a powerful application when it enters maturity. Currently, I do not think it is ready for use.

1. Bad systray juju

Pidgin, and others I'm sure, has problems with the new systray and also displaying images in the task bar. The images are randomly blurred and or dithered into a rainbow of colors. This kept pidgin from running, it seems. Upon launching it, It would drop down to the systray and then crash. I was forced to set the systray configuration for Pidgin to "Never".

2. Keyboard shortcuts (alt+tab not switching apps)

KDE has been renowned for including keyboard shortcuts that were windows like. Through kpersonalizer, you could quickly configure your environment to mimic even the windows key short cuts. The version I am using doesn't even respect ALT+TAB, let alone come with pre configured shortcut sets for commonly used operating systems.

3. No GTK-QT rendering

Firefox looks just plain ugly. Seriously, I remember when you had to download an external package to get kde to do the gtk rendering. When newer versions started to include this functionality, I was over joyed. So I am curious if this will surface in future updates or if it will have to be hacked.

4. Right clicking useless

The day when right clicking on the taskbar to add an applet, widget, or other object has left us. It appears that you can only remove or configure widgets. When right clicking I only see a minimal subset of options, which isn't satisfactory for me.

5. Customization

Where did all of the options go? How can I get the taskbar to not display applications on other desktops? This has been one of the first things I've changed on new kde systems. Now the option is nowhere to be found. It's not just this, but much of the customization through configuration is absent on incomplete.

Conclusion:

Kubuntu KDE 4.0 Sucks right now. No seriously, it does... might as well be flux box with widgets and plasmoids, which most people aren't going to care about.