I made the same experience, I found the latest KDE3 as nearly enterprise ready and I recommended it to many people.
Slackware and openSUSE has KDE3 packages very long, (and it seems that you did not have a problem with KDE but with your distribution, so blame the right ones) so it was not that big problem, but still a disappointment.
if you search the archive that you can find a post from me where I say that KDE should be removed from Slackware, I was that angry with version 4.
But I am used to reflect about my opinions and re-evaluate them from time to time, and so I became again a happy KDE user.

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Last month the city of Montpellier hosted the "Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre", a worldwide Linux convention with FOSS folks from all over the world. I had a nice and quite extended talk with a KDE developer. At some point, we got to the point where I could tell him in all honesty what I liked and didn't like about KDE, since I've been using it since versions 2.x and 3.x. A bunch of great apps (Dolphin, K3B, Okular, Digikam), great artwork, great functionality. And then almost always some breakage or some infamous resource hog at some point on the other end. The persistent feeling that the whole KDE 4.x desktop is in a permanent unfinished status, with developers being more interested in adding new functionality than ironing out show-stopping bugs. Add to that a frantic release cycle, and this sums up to quite some frustration. I described to him a vision of an "ideal" KDE. Where the developers would eventually fork a "business" version of KDE, with a reduced set of functionality, but rock-solid and well-tendered, eventually with a more modular design at the core. To my surprise, he shared my view completely and let me know that this was exactly what he was telling the other developers too.

On a side note: a few months ago, I discovered the Pantheon desktop, an original creation by the Elementary OS folks. To me, this seems no less than the perfect Linux desktop. Not too heavy on the resources, extremely beautiful, and with just the functionality I need without getting in the way. It allows a nice workflow, and it has that "Wow!" effect. It would be great to port this desktop to Slackware, but this is a bit beyond my technical skills.

Cheers,

Niki

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LXQt is a nice (and small) KDE-like desktop:
http://lxqt.org/

Might become even more useful for Slackware once KDE starts using kwin_wayland (needs logind).

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I also miss many things from the past:
- The look and feel of KDE 3.5.*
- The old icon theme of GNOME (pre 2.16), based on gperfection2
- Some old GTK themes, from which fishing the sky comes to mind

Sure, there are probably ways to bring all that back. However, things change. I try to be a little bit more flexible myself and adapt new things to my linking in stead of being stuck in the past.

I left Kde as soon as Kde4 became unavoidable and switched to Enlightenment. First with Elive which at the time was the most well maintained E17 distro available. then Pclinux when they put out 2 different E17 iso's, a community remix and an official(I preferred the community version but the developer left). Then Slackware with the SlackE17 projects version of E17 for Slackware. Since the release 14.1 I've been running Kde4 and it's acceptable but still wish Kde3 was an option as I MUCH preferred it. I've tried Trinity many times over the years but found way to many issues for me to use it as my main desktop and with so few developers I doubt it'll ever be truly complete.

I also miss KDE3. I used Trinity a while but did not like how complicated that made my start menu, with it having both KDE4 an Trinity software. At one time--maybe even during KDE3--I tried to install SimpleKDE. I even talked to one person who said he only really liked KDE1, and every major version after that has had more disadvantages. What I mainly miss from older versions, unless they also had things like akonadi/nepomuk/strigi (that can halt even a powerful/fast system within minutes of starting and not disabling those), is the ability to have both a colour gradient and full-size image as the background. Now you can have one or the other, or a very tiny image in a silly box. I like the Dolphin file manager... I forgot if that was in KDE3, but if not, it is the only thing really making KDE4 worth it. Also, KDE3's panel configuration was much easier... it took me hours to figure out how to use it the first time in KDE4, and I still hate how it works in comparison, though it is usable.

I just spent more than two months on an Ubuntu-and-derivatives-diet, due to some job demands. Today I had a bit of free time for experimenting, so I dug out a half-finished project I had undertaken some time ago: a stripped down KDE desktop, one application per task, and the heavyweight apps replaced by some more lightweight but nicely integrated counterparts. I still have a dozen or so Xfce- and MATE-based MLED desktops running either at client's offices or friend's homes, but I admit I've never been completely happy with these. Xfce has always been too incomplete for what I wanted it to do, and I could never manage to completely get rid of MATE's "east german look & feel", if you know what I mean. Now I have Slackware64 14.1 running in a VM, testing a bunch of SlackBuilds and configuration scripts, and my KDE 4.10.5 looks and works increasingly like the old KDE 3.5.10 desktop I had grown so fond of.

https://github.com/kikinovak/slackwa...4.1-source/kde

This is early alpha, so don't try to use it.

Cheers,

Niki

What I would need now is a couple weeks without any obligations. Just time to do THIS.

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Hi.

When KDE 4 first appeared I positively hated it.

Then I tried Trinity, and for QT4 apps I just compiled my own QT4.

Then, out of laziness, I just gave KDE 4 a try and I must admit it has matured.

However I do miss one handy tool I used to have in KDE 3: Kommander (now there isn't kmdr-editor and kmdr-executor doesn't work as good as it used to on KDE 3).

One more thing I miss is to edit just one .desktop file to edit command associations (the devs said few people used that feature so they thought it was better to just use the MIME databases which I've grown accustomed to use lately - I just say editing just one .desktop file to manage associations was efficient and easy).

I do not use Dolphin at all. I use Konqueror as my file manager. And I completely disable the evil 3.

can you post some screenshots when you have the time?

I didn't like KDE4 at first, but I've got used to it now. And it's behaving itself a lot better than it did. Running 4.12.5 on 14.1, thanks and to Eric for providing it.

Looks exactly like a stock Kubuntu 10.04 LTS. Boring. Intentionally so.

Sorry if my English is bad. I'm using a translator and perhaps with a little patience we can communicate. I use Slackware 14.1 and 13:37 and the two 3.5 with KDE3. 13:37 fundiona perfectly on Slackware 14.1 and with little problems.

The great advantage of using kde3 is its low RAM usage. A normal installation consumes 124MB with normail services installation (Slackware 14.1). XFCE4 would use around 160MB, but resources are best KDE3. KDE4 is very good but I also can not get used to him.