I have been using the KDE 4.1 since it was published in late July. I have used it with both, nVidia and ATI videocards, so I think I have pretty good overview of KDE 4’s status with the modern hardware. There are many good things about the KDE 4, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

So let’s start with the good stuff first. KDE 4 has a completely new approach to the deskop: there are no traditional desktop icons, but the whole desktop is build of Plasmoids. In fact, even taskbar and desktop icons are Plasmoids. There are also mini-applications, Widgets, which are similar to Windows Vista’s Gadgets. All of these Plasmoids are easily resizable and customizable, making it easy to create a desktop of your likes.

There are also several new frameworks such as Phonon, the multimedia API and Solid, the device integration framework. These frameworks are mainly ‘under the hood’ changes and are not visible to the end user. Also, Konqueror is no longer used as the file manager, as it’s replaced by Dolphin. Dolphin is basically an update to KDE 3’s file manager with better integration of tagging, image preview and places. And I must say, it’s one of the things that have impressed me in the KDE 4. It’s simple enough and it tends to just work.

There’s one more thing that is worth mentioning: the improved windows manager: KWin. KWin has finally all those cool effects from Compiz Fusion and Vista. Flip swith, cover switch, box switch, window thumbnails, minimizing and maximizing effects, shadows… you name it! This brings KDE 4 straigth to the 21th century.

But, there is always a but: with the modern graphics cards these features are hardly working. There are massive rendering bugs, crashes, white screens and performance issues. Trust me, I’ve seen it all. I first had a nVidia card which worked semi-well: just few rendering issues and increased CPU usage. But I had to disable most of the features to keep my system responsive.

I knew that nVidia’s driver is a bit crappy but that’s nothing compared to ATI. I recently upgraded my GPU to ATI to get the HD acceleration for my HTPC. I thought I had seen it all with nVidia, but no: ATI is even worse. If I enable KWin’s desktop effects, all I get is a white screen. Even without the desktop effects there are some rendering bugs, but I those are already known from the nVidia experience. And as for HTPC use, both cards are equally useless with KDE 4. It’s impossible to get dual monitor working. If I managed to get the Xorg config right (believe me, I’ve gone trough the hell and back tweaking it), all I get is a black screen on my secondary display. Though, I can see the mouse cursor on the black screen but it doesn’t help much. Ok, I admit it, there might be someway to get it working by tweaking the Xorg config. But even so, it’s far from the good user experience.

Some KDE applications have some bugs, like some settings aren’t always saved, Konsole jams sometimes so that you cannot righ-click to open the context menu, etc. but the main issues are definitely with the graphic cards. So, is the KDE 4 the future of the desktops? Maybe someday, but for now there are too many unfinished features and graphic card vendors have a lot of work to do with their drivers. I cannot recommend KDE 4 for every one, but if you like to try new things, it’s definitely worth trying. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a great desktop environment some day!