KDE 4.2 is finally released.

[Sharktooth]

January 27, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "The Answer", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008. After the release of KDE 4.1, which was aimed at casual users, the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users.
Announcement and new features... (http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.2/)

[microchip8]

yup yup, using it here and so far looks very good. Stability is much improved, very polished and although not everything is implemented compared to the 3.5.x series, I'd say it's the first kde4 version that can be considered as being stable/usable for the average user. I've been on it since 4.2rc1

[WalterK]

Hows it handle those pesky Nvidia cards?
I rue the day i ever bought one of those cards.
Sure video game playback is a little better.
But no xvmc, video tearing when using any sort of composite manager (compiz-fusion etc) , not to mention the problems with kde and nvidia cards.

[Sharktooth]

tested with a gf6800 (180.22), it seems there are no problems with video (VLC 0.9.8a).

[microchip8]

gf7100gs here and also no problems so far

[WalterK]

Yeah those work but how about the semi modern ones like the 8xxx and up series?

[microchip8]

I dont think it should be a problem with them. Lots of people on the SUSE forum use 8xxx series and have no problems

[nm]

But no xvmc, ...
Who cares about XvMC anymore? You now have access to full hardware decoding through VDPAU!

[yeye69]

I was kde user for long time, ver. 3.x. After the beginning of the using the very buggy ver. 4.x, I switched to gnome, almost like L.Torvalds :). There is a strange feeling I don't wont switch back even to take a look, not saying of trying.

[Sharktooth]

i hear you. i switched to gnome too but 4.2 is almost there... it will make 3.5 users happy (almost).
so, now, i have both... ;)

[Hellworm]

Why do you switch to gnome if you were using kde 3? Personally I disliked kde 4 too in the beginning , so I switched to debian (from ubuntu) to keep kde 3.
But it's good to hear that kde 4 is usable now, need to test it when I feel like experimenting.

[yeye69]

Why do you switch to gnome if you were using kde 3? Personally I disliked kde 4 too in the beginning , so I switched to debian (from ubuntu) to keep kde 3.
But it's good to hear that kde 4 is usable now, need to test it when I feel like experimenting.

Maybe I'm too lazy to change my distro (range Redhat - Fedora)

[Sharktooth]

@Hellworm: i started using gome coz i heard a lot of ppl switched to it AND i wanted to try it just to see why those ppl switched. in the meanwhile i highly customized it and i get used to it and decided to keep gnome as my main option waiting for a more useable KDE 4 version.

[microchip8]

Just wait till the GNOME devs overhaul their aging code base with new technologies/code, which will happen pretty soon as plans of doing so are already ongoing. Then I'll see the same amount of GNOME people screaming and complaining just like the KDE people did when KDE4 was released. Of course, there's a good chance that the GNOME folks will look back at what happened to the KDE 4.0 fiasco and try to avoid it, but I'm pretty sure their transition won't go flawlessly either...

Also, I use a distro (openSUSE) that allows me to have KDE3, KDE4, GNOME and Xfce SIMULTANEOUSLY on my machines and I can all try them out and decide which I find better for my needs. If your distro ditched KDE3 because KDE4 was available, blame the distro itself. This was the case with Linus and Fedora. Fedora has a very small KDE team and the decision to replace KDE3 with KDE4 completely and not offer an option to install KDE3 was made becasue the Fedora KDE team does not have the resources to manage both KDE versions, so in the end they went for KDE4 only and broke things, thus forcing Linus to go the GNOME way

People who dislike KDE4 but HAVE the option of sticking with KDE3 are just stupid/ignorant in switching to GNOME. If one has the option of using KDE3 then USE IT. I don't see why one should switch to GNOME because he's a KDE user and dislikes KDE4 but knows he can still use KDE3

[Sharktooth]

in my case it was a matter of lazyness.
i mean, i replaced kde3 with kde4, but it was still not useable. i kept it installed, waiting for updates. since i didnt want to make a mess i completely removed kde3 in favour of kde4.
at that point i also installed gnome and XFCE to have something to "work with", so i could have a stable desktop manager and still have KDE 4 installed to experiment with.

[yeye69]

If in the future gnome will change a codebase and become buggy as kde 4.0 then I will switch to other DE, kde 4.x or XFCE or so... :)

froggy, as you know, almost all distro can have SIMULTANEOUSLY, as you wrote before, several DE :).

People who dislike KDE4 but HAVE the option of sticking with KDE3 are just stupid/ignorant in switching to GNOME.

What sounds...:) It's just DE, nothing else, as for me the shell to run other programs

[krosswindz]

I was big fan of the KDE desktop till 3.4 or so after that I switched to enlightenment. I am so used to configuring everything from command line, enlightenment is best for me.

[buzzqw]

i startd as kde fan, i like the "windows like" feeling

but as more my knoledge of linux growth as more i dislike KDE

six month ago i have switched to gnome. i like it

BHH

[Ranguvar]

I absolutely detest GNOME with every bone in my body :p The thinking "users are generally idiots, we must remove all confusing configuration" is completely broken IMO (Google for the fork of Pidgin to Funpidgin, now called Carrier), and development I would say has stagnated.

I use Arch on both my desktop and old ThinkPad T41 laptop. On the former, I've been playing around with tiling window managers - they're usually a ton more efficient, and eventually you come to realize that the command-line and the keyboard are faster for most things. I'll probably end up using either Awesome, Xmonad, wmii, or dwm. If I decide against tiling, probably PekWM. I have started to dislike DEs altogether.

On the laptop, where I don't have time to completely tweak and mod, I run KDEmod (modular KDE for Arch) 3.5.10. I'll try KDEmod 4.2 soon, but it might be too heavy for the little guy. If I ever switch, it'll probably be to Xfce or LXDE for even faster performance.

[Rasi]

Same here.. Arch user and i really like the light WM's openbox is just so nice.

I never quite managed to get used to the tiling wms - i use them reguarly, but the configs are pure horror for me (lua, haskel, plan9, etc) awesome luckily has quite a nice default config that also plays nicely with dual head setup.

But still i use kde and gnome both quite often (My wife would kill me, if there is only a tiling or barebones WM) and have to say they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Gnome/GTK looks really nice to me. while KDE/QT has that "professional" look. same for the applications. gtk apps tend to be easy while qt apps cover the whole area.

Well, i stopped being a distro hopper, now i am a WM hopper - the curse of unix-like OS.

[Henrikx]

Update KDE 4.2.1 /qt 4.5

tested with Mandriva 2009. Great!!

[Sharktooth]

upgrading right now...:)