KDE 4.2 Review

KDE 4.2 has come out and word out there is that it has finally caught back up to KDE 3.5 in features. So, I upgrade my Ubuntu to 8.10 and then installed KDE 4.2.

First I would like to say that I do like KDE 4.2. It's fresh and I can see a lot of potential in what it can become. It has a lot of flash to offer and ability to customize different aspects to make it the way you want it.

Now, the downside of KDE 4.2 is that I was forced to switch back to Gnome because it crashed so often. Just adjusting the task bar caused it to crash at least ten different times. Using it to copy some music to my Blackberry cause corruption to the filesystem on my 8GB SDHC card. Then it froze my entire system causing corruption to my root filesystem. Needless to say, I had to boot from a rescue disk and fsck my root filesystem. Once I fixed the filesytem damage, I log back on with the intension of switching back to Gnome and it freezes again, this time corrupting the current kernel making my default boot corrupt. Lucky, I keep the last three kernels bootable.

I booted from an older kernel and from the login menu I chose Gnome and logged in. Removed the newest kernel and then reinstalled it. Everything now runs fine. I still have the KDE login menu, but it logs into the Gnome desktop.

With what I saw in KDE 4.2 I can't wait for KDE 4.3, but KDE 4.2 just isn't usable.