The inability to use the kde panel outside of kde desktop and the separation of file and web browsers are striking examples of things I consider downgrades. Konquer’s do everything ability was a major step forward over other browsers and non free OS. KDE 3.5′s X11 modularity was admirable for more than the Kicker.

The move to databases for KDE PIM has still not paid off for me, and there is some controversy over it. The person who made the move boasted:

Working on the port of KAddressBook has been real fun, because I had the chance to throw away all the ugly, historically grown code and restart from scratch.

Now that’s confidence! There are still feature losses and I’m not used to it. Data handling through Akondi is complex and I’m still learning how it syncs and when. One particular annoyance I’ve yet to fix is being able to search all of my address books at once. There is no top level for me, so I have to search all of a dozen or so books one at a time to match a contact. That is a huge regression. I have not yet learned how to sync my older gadgets besides copying files back to a KDE 3.5 system that still works.

I’m reasonably sure the community will get KDE 4 where KDE 3 was but it has caused some disruption and I’m not sure it was worth it. The people at Trinity assert they can get everything done with DCOP, which Free Desktop copied. In a way, it feels like the Gnome people reached out and screwed up KDE just before Microsoft moved in for the QT kill. If KDE remains true to software freedom, these problems will fade in time. KDE 4 is about as usable and stable as Gnome. I’m waiting for it to be as stable as KDE 3.