Kde 4.3 – Innovation or just patching?

by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Aug 6, 2009 | Linux

Recently I upgraded my KDE version 4.2 to the 4.3 and I’ve been using it for a few days now. As said before I don’t mind using betas and do some testing, but as with everything there is an exception, in my case it was KDE, I used the first KDE4 betas and come back to 3.5 then used the 4.1 when it was stable, then 4.2 and tried the beta 4.3… once again came back to the 4.2, now that is stable I’m using version 4.3, and for the first time in KDE4 I can say it’s stable. In my opinion KDE4 was released way to early, and although usable it was needing serious work around it. I’m a Linux user with several years of experience and didn’t have much trouble using it, but for instance my wife would go crazy, so till KDE4.3 she was using KDE3.5.

What changed in this last version of KDE that made me upgrade all my machines to KDE4.3?

The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs.

Implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months.

Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors.

If you want to read more about it just check this link.

All this made KDE4.3 more user friendly, more reliable, more polished and prettier.

So, what more can I say about it? JUST INSTALL IT AND GIVE A TRY you won’t be disappointed.

In conclusion is there innovation or just patching in KDE 4.3? Definitely both, there’s hundreds of new features and even more bug fixes. Both are equally important and KDE really need this ultimate push to be the ultimate Desktop Manger.

Cheers and see you next time

Pedro Oliveira

ps – bellow there are the install instructions and a vid of kde4.3 in action.

If you need help to install it just check the install instructions (from www.kde.org):

Debian KDE 4.3.0 packages are available in the unstable repository.

• Fedora
  • Rawhide development repository, however the packages there may depend on other Rawhide packages and are therefore not suitable for installation on previous releases.
  • Unofficial Fedora 11/10 packages are hosted at the kde-redhat project.
  • Kubuntu packages are available for 9.04. More details can be found in the announcement on Kubuntu.org.
  • Mandriva provide packages for

Please refer to README to more information.
For Mandriva Cooker ( development ) users, 4.3.0 is will be available at cooker repositories.

openSUSE packages are available for openSUSE 11.1 (one-click install), for openSUSE 11.0 (one-click install) and for openSUSE 10.3 (one-click install) and openSUSE Factory (one-click install). A KDE Four Live CD with these packages is also available.

Magic Linux KDE 4.3.0 packages are available for Magic Linux 2.5. See the release notes for detailed information and the FTP tree for packages.