KDE 4.2 is still below beta quality

KDE 4.2 is still an alpha quality code. Code reaches beta quality when testers are required to find bugs. Anything with evident bugs is an alpha regardless of what it can do.

Since Slackware current testing readme tells us that KDE 4 will be probably merged into the main tree soon, I decided that it is time to check it out. In less than an hour I experienced the following immediately evident bugs:

Analog clock in the auto-hiding task bar managed to show up as a narrow elliptical face with 2 correctly drawn hands below it. Possibly it started to draw itself when the task bar, which is animated, was half way up.

The "5 days since new moon" pop-up generated by the moon phase plasma applet appears at different places, that is, not always immediately above the applet.

Pop-ups from the moon phase applet and task bar applets grab the portions of the desktop wallpaper below them and patch that on top of other windows. This does not happen during normal operation, just when I am wondering how the pop-ups and desktop switching work and click, switch desktops, and move windows vigorously.

The task bar auto hides itself while the mouse cursor is moving within its borders. Abrupt mouse movements from one applet to another make that more likely.

The World Clock applet stops reacting to mouse movements after "used custom time zone" is selected in its control panel.

An attempt to change the height of the task panel results in 3/4 of the desktop background going black.

Just in case somebody thinks "oh, all that worked fine on the developer's system": please do not write software in such a way that it works on one system.

I also noticed immediately evident usability problems:

The moon phase applet tells me how many whole days has passed since the new moon. This is absolutely useless because anybody interested in moon phase is interested in "which half of which moon day is it". Moon days are different from calendar days and computer help is required to calculate them.

The World Clock applet hides a beautiful map under an unreasonably large time label and the size of that label cannot be configured. There is a work around: select "show date" to make the label text longer and its font smaller. However, this reveals another immediately evident bug: the applet first displays a part of the label in the same big font and only when the mouse enters the applet the font is adjusted.

There are system monitoring applets that monitor everything but memory usage(!). No comment to avoid profanity.

Phonon is better with multiple sound devices, but I cannot call that a step in the right direction. I guess sound is no different from any other shared resource and all that a player should be able to do is to select a sound sink (predefined elsewhere unless we want a really complex dialog), exactly like another app selects a file to write to. Once again: a sound sink, something linked to mixers, filters, recorders and the like, not a choice between alsa/oss/aRts or whatever. The "hey app, please tell what kind of an app you are and the system will figure out where to direct your output" approach is brain dead.

Dragon Player plays the first file OK, but asking it to play another one is risky: it may display garbage like an analog TV out of horizontal sync or double image looking like an interlace problem. With gXine apparently similar problems can be cured if "Overlay" is specified as the preferred video display method, but Dragon Player has no configurable options.

As expected, "enable desktop effects" disables windowed video and scim setup fails to provide scim.

And the final and the greatest complaint: KDE 4.2 is noticeably faster (disclaimer: on my hardware) than 3.5.10, looks better, is easier and more fun to use, and Dolphin is the first file manager other than MC that I agree to use regularly, meaning that I will suffer from these and all other KDE 4 problems from now on because I switched to KDE 4.