Being a Gnome user in my department made me a kind of outsider. Nearly all my colleagues use or even develop KDE. After half a year harassment, I finally decided to switch to KDE4 with my update to openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4.

The first two days were really tough: many of the concepts behind KDE4 are totally different from Gnome and Mac OSX so I had to get adjusted to it. As a former Gnome user I really like the idea of having not hundreds of configuration options per application. In my opinion the distributor should provide reasonable defaults for the desktop and it’s applications. Having tried the latest Fedora 10 preview and Kubuntu 8.10 I must admit, that openSUSE 11.1 delivers today the best KDE4 experience. Kudos to my colleagues from the KDE desktop team - you do a great job!

Nevertheless KDE4 has some disadvantages over the existing desktops: some parts of it, especially KWin, Plasma and Kontact are relatively unstable and crash regularly. On the other hand many features from existing KDE3 applications are still missing or do not work as expected. But you have the choice: all KDE3 applications are still available and of course you can mix them. For this reason I respect all KDE developers that work during the major version transition on two different versions of their application.

I am right now using exclusively KDE4 applications - even Kontact for my calendars (private Kolab, Google Calendar, Novell Groupwise and several iCal-based calendars) and Amarok2 for my huge music collection. The only thing that I did not migrate yet is my messenger. Despite the fact that one of Kopete’s developers is one of my room mates I am still using purple, which integrates well into KDE4. The only thing that does not work is compositing: KWin does not like my graphics card or its driver.

Concluding my first KDE4 test week I must say it changed my mind: I really like my new desktop and it makes fun to work with it. For me it is absolutely unacceptable now that people, which did not give KDE4 a fair chance by testing it at least a full work week, raise their complains that KDE4 is generally unusable or totally unstable. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants a stable, well maintained KDE3 desktop or support the development of the future desktop. KDE does a great job making the transition as comfortable as possible and I think users should thank them for providing two desktop alternatives.

PS: I prefer using sudo instead of su. To configure this behaviour in kdesu you have to add to your ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc the following line:

    [super-user-command]
    super-user-command=sudo

Thanks to André & Tom for this hint!