I thought my reaction to the new KDE 4.2 might be worth mentioning since (1) a lot of people might be waiting for it to become available in their distros and haven't tried it yet, (2) many people might have been put off by 4.0 and 4.1 and thus are not anxious to get their hopes up, and (3) I never liked KDE before, and I've been checking it out periodically since KDE 1.0 (I always chose something different: TWM, Gnome, Enlightenment, Blackbox, Openbox, even Xmonad ...) so this is not the usual fanboy excitement. In my world, this is a shocking new development.

I put KDE 4.2 on an Arch ext4 partition and find it to be fast, responsive, attractive, solid, and simply nice to use. For one thing, they finally clued in to Konqueror being just too complicated and awkward as a do-everything program. Dolphin is fine as a file manager. (Yes, they did that with the 4.x alphas and betas, but now it all comes together because the general functionality is back.) Another thing: they got rid of the clownish, cartoon look they always had before. KDE is now sexy. Who would've thought? And it really is fast; I'm comparing to Openbox, here, not Gnome.

Since I was lazy and cloned an Openbox partition for this install, all the GTK stuff that I need to use ("need" as in I share data with these apps across several distros: GVim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pan, OpenOffice) were intact and looking good. Fonts, themes, are great in GTK. (I did download a couple of extra packages to make this happen.) So now I have the best of all worlds.

I'm not going to blather on because I'm sure there are many KDE users who could fill you in on the details from a more knowledgeable perspective. I just wanted to give a thumbs up from someone who had previously never wanted to use KDE, and who now is enjoying KDE 4.2 quite a bit. I know there's a lot more to do with the KDE 4 series, but kudos to the KDE devs for hanging in and delivering. It's really shaping up.

I never tried unstable D.E., this is my first time I use an instable and important component of a system, I'm really satisfied about KDE4.2, seen all critics about KDE4.1 and KDE4.0. I use slackware-current with KDE4.2 and I do not have great problems with it. I've seen some bugs in amarok, some MP3s don't work, any way, I do anything with that without any difficulty. I'm really happy and satisfied. Bye.

- tray icons are garbled for me as soon as I remove some of them. They seem to be not redrawn, you can see the old icons in the background. -> not big issue, but looks stupid

- the semantic desktop does not work at all, it's disabled by default and cannot even be started because a strigi backend is missing. -> not big issue for me personally, as I dislike desktop searches anyway. But they announced that as a killer feature since long before 4.0

- plasma has a memory leak that lets memory usage as well as cpu usage go up with time, so I have to restart the x-server. -> big issue

- the screen saver gives me a bright white screen instead of a black one sometimes -> not exactly screen saving

- When logging into kde I see a garbled mess of my previous kde session for a short time -> not big issue but very ugly !

- When I change the desktop effects, plasma crashes every time (or was it kwin ?) -> not big issue as it restarts immediately and changes are in place

- kcontrol from kde3 cannot co-exist, so I cannot change colours and theme from kde3 apps anymore (at least I don't know how).

- 50% of the plasmoids are buggy

other than that, kde 4.2 is quiet ok

I'm using the packages from debian experimental.

It is Kwin. Any way, all your "bugs" you found are maybe caused because you didn't do a clean installation of KDE4.2. I don't know what procedure you did, but if you installed KDE as "dirty"(with all KDE3.x programs for example)reinstall it as "clean". I'm lucky to have a bash script which deletes all packages of KDE3. LOL. Pat is great and his scripts too.

However, I've been finding just some bug in KDE4.2, K3B has one of them, amarok, kwin and some plasmoid. KDE is now stable and ready to be used by experts and beginners.

Yes, this I've noticed.

I tried KDE 4.2 on openSuse this week, too, and got the same thing. I don't see this on my Arch install.

There's more work to do on the 4 series obviously, and with Debian Experimental in particular you're not guaranteed a pleasant experience, nor one you can draw conclusions from. Debian is not where to go for cutting edge stuff; you'll need to wait for Lenny to be released and KDE4 to hit Sid before much polish goes into it. (I also run Sidux and I'm not brave enought to try KDE 4.2 on there yet.) Also I wouldn't touch amarok or k3b yet; they seem not to be ready for KDE4.

But overall KDE is on the right track at last I think.

I think the debian kde-maintainers do a very good job with their packages. Actually I think they do an outstanding job as I cannot remember any debian specific issues with kde packages in any repo.
Those things I posted are all kde specific, not debian.

well, I'm probably an old man before that happens ...

yes, 4.2 is a big step forward. It is what 4.0 should have been. They have released it 1 year too early imho.

Well, I'm an old Debian user and a big fan (Testing and Sidux are two of my favorite distros), but the state of Experimental is never guaranteed to be usable at any given moment. I'm not so sure all of the problems you mention are KDE-specific because I'm not getting them all with Arch, which is probably more vanilla KDE.

[EDIT: Now I'm curious to try KDE 4.2 from Experimental for myself, probably in Sidux, though all I have to do is wait---it should come fairly soon into Sid now that Lenny is RC2 ... though maybe not ]

I think too many distros jumped too soon and offered beta versions as the default desktop. 4.0 wasn't that big a problem because most people knew it was alpha; 4.1 was a kick in the teeth for many because they thought it would fix all the problems in 4.0, but it was only beta. But you're right, KDE could have been more careful and protected themselves more from these misunderstandings, though from their point of view, it was better to go public, take the heat, and get the feedback.

It's an instant-gratification society we're in, and I think KDE doesn't have the number of devs it needs to keep up with that kind of demand. The 4 series is very brave and ambitious, from what I've seen. I think they've done well, considering.

I've got the OpenSuSE 11.1 version on a laptop & I agree with your comment. In addition, what came out as 4.0 should have been 3.99 and 4.2 should have been 4.0. That would have deflected a lot of the criticism and created wider understanding of what is going on.

I saw a screenshot of an alpha of 4.0 and was excited; but when I tried it, it was the most underwhelming thing ever. So then I had hopes for 4.01 - dashed, 4.02 - dashed....4.1.04 with backports & additions - usable, but very unfinished.

So I think it will be something like 4.3, before I am really happy, but a couple of months ago, I thought I was never going to be happy with KDE again and now I think that it won't be all that long.