KDE won’t get out of the internal news since the KDE4 series are the topic number one and everybody seems to dig it. Nobody wants to wait to have a look at the new desktop – even in the gentoo forums, there’s much noise in many threads.

But here a word of warning: Even the developers do not recommend it for daily usage.

But why? Well – KDE4 is brand new technology and compareable with a rewrite from scratch. That’s why some features like PIM or plasma are not implemented yet – or just not fully working.

So the question is, if the whole work was worth it. Let’s give them some time. I am sure, KDE 4.1 will show us some nice new things we didn’t expect. As the technological jump won’t be that big, I’d expect it this year to be released.

The whole story reminds me a bit of the windows vista start as everybody was out for grabbing it even before there were good drivers and applications around making use of the new features. Of course, KDE is not an operating system – it’s ‘just’ a desktop environment and a set of applications. If you are that curious about the new features, here’s a word of warning: Most of the changes happened ‘under the hood’ and cannot be discovered in a 30 minutes testdrive.

If you just like the new KDE look, here’s a little solution: There is a way of using the oxygen iconset on your current KDE version. And there are also ways of patching kicker to make use of the ‘KickOff’ menu – just read about it in the Gentoo Forums or have a look at the desktop effects overlay.