I’ve been checking up on the progress of KDE 4 using the Kubuntu member repository as it moved through various betas and a few days ago the official 4.1 release moved in. While it obviously lacks the many years of polish that went into KDE3, at this point its basically mature enough that I’m now using it as my full time desktop. Many of the applications do not yet have KDE4 versions available, but you can seamlessly run their KDE3 counterparts in the KDE4 desktop....
Some great news out of the KDE 4 development: Dolphin will replace/coexist with Konqueror as the main file manager. One of my few issues with KDE is Konqueror – trying to be both a web browser and a file manager, when it really is more a web browser. All the options are basically exclusively oriented toward web browsing and its incredibly convoluted “Profile” system. Its truly indicative of feature creep....
I know… Linux distributions and their funky names. But this one is a quality distribution. I had never tried Debian or a Debian-based distribution before, and I have to say I’m impressed. Debian itself is an interesting community. It has three “releases” (stable, testing, unstable). Stable is always incredibly out of date, while unstable takes new updates as they are available. The key to any Linux distribution (IMO) is the packaging method....