But anyway, I decided to install KDE3 on Ubuntu 9.04, but as soon as I installed it I realized how little support for it there is nowadays...everything's KDE4 this, KDE4 that now. So I installed KDE4. Since I last installed it it has gone a long way, but it still has way too much crapware and not a very good and intuitive UI. That said, it definitely has gone a long way since the early betas.
But amarok 2?! Either you love it or you hate it. I used to hate it, now I'm beginning to love it. I see what the developers have done with the UI now, but until I forced myself into using it, it was just a useless piece of junk. I do think the new UI is intrinsically better than the old one, it just isn't what any other music player around has, therefore no one's used to it.
One point is that if you never change anything, innovation doesn't happen. But there's the counter-phrase "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and I think both of these strategies apply here, depending on who you are and what you do with your computer. If you're a developer or just eager to use cutting-edge software, then KDE4 is brilliant, but if all you do is check your email and watch stuff on youtube (or not), then KDE4 is a massive hold-up stopping you from doing those simple tasks, due to its massive design overhaul. And no, I don't think KDE4 will kill GNOME, as the people I mentioned before are, in my opinion, much better suited to GNOME due to its intuitive UI and speediness.
Which brings us to the ugly point of KDE4's slowness. It takes about 5 milliseconds to open the kicker menu, now this may sound like a very small amount of time, but unless it's absolutely instantaneous you will notice the latency. Things like this I see all around KDE4 (especially the transparent window-move which I turned off almost straight away). I do like the wobbly window effect in KDE4 though, it's better IMO than the one in Compiz Fusion, although if you want high configurability use the latter.
But the point about KDE4's slowness really reminds me of Vista in early 2007 when it was released. Sure, nowadays most new computers seem to be able to run Vista pretty much just fine, but in 2007 on the computers of then it was a real drag (just lookup 'vista sucks' in google).
I think KDE4 is just like that, although it uses more CPU cycles from what I see than Vista does. I think in 2 years all new computers will run KDE4 really well, but now, well, you get the picture.
Yes, I do think plasma is unnecessary bloatware, which is basically what KDE4 is. Maybe if they designed it to use less CPU cycles, and let other apps use them instead (high nice value or something), it would be just fine. But at the moment, it just slows my computer down. Not that I have any low end box, it's a good dual core athlon at 3.1ghz, with 4gb RAM. And I've thrown in a geforce 9800 GT for good measure (+ gaming), so you can't complain about my hardware being too slow. I'll see if it's still slow once I get my Phenom II 940 quad core...:D
So, the conclusion is, KDE4 is good, but it's ahead of the current computer hardware to run it well, in my opinion. A bit like the Crysis of desktop environments, if you like ;).
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