As you’ve probably guessed from my previous rants, I decided to try out KDE 4 under FreeBSD. It was really quite stunning, elegant, and simultaneously disappointing. I’ll cover the pros and cons here. Be aware that this is just a rough overview and covers my experiences with KDE 4 under FreeBSD; I may add another installment for KDE 4 under Ubuntu, which I have just recently installed as well.

KDE 4 is still in development and should be considered beta software. My comments here are representative of KDE 4.2.0 and, more specifically, the FreeBSD port. It is important to note that many of my complaints will probably be addressed in the coming months as the KDE developers implement missing features, fix bugs, and the KDE port to FreeBSD gains stability. Instead, it would be advisable to take my review as a commentary on the current state of KDE.

Update

I will be posting my thoughts on KDE 4 running under Ubuntu in the coming days. Canonical’s patches and additions to KDE appear to make even the older version (4.1.x) very usable!
Read more…