KDE 4.1 unleashed

First of all I want to say kudos to everyone who worked on getting KDE 4.1 into the portage tree and ironing out issues. Just lurking (mostly) in #gentoo-kde, I have seen how people have worked hard to bring the best possible KDE-4 experience to Gentoo users. The past months have been a stressful time for our KDE team, and they deserve to be rewarded, now that all that has led to good results.

Even so, and notwithstanding the excellent work done by our devs and helpful users, I am of the opinion that KDE 4 is not yet up to the task of replacing the 3.5 version, both in terms of features and stability. I will keep using KDE 3.5 (and LXDE) for now. But I'll give it another shot when 4.2 comes out.

For the time being, I'm masking kde-4.1 and related packages. Other people that are running an ~arch box, and want to keep just kde-3.5 and not also install the “upgrade” to 4.1, may be interested in my kde-4.1 mask file, that can be dropped in /etc/portage/package.mask/ (that's why it is handy to have that as a directory, not a file).

10 Oct 08 - 12:40 | and

Responses to ‘KDE 4.1 unleashed’:

  1. Alec on 10 Oct 08 - 15:37

    Although I'm not planning to wait until 4.2, I decided to keep all of the packages from "updating" by moving all the KDE3-related packages from the world file into a set, and with a short bash loop added :3.5 to each package. Now, if I want to install only certain components of KDE4, I don't need to fiddle around with mask files. Sets are awesome!

  2. Decibels on 10 Oct 08 - 19:39

    After trying kde-4.1.2 and almost liking it. I found that couldn't use desktop icons. That was a killer there. I don't use many, but do have partition icons for other partitions and git repo. Unless I find a way to get device icons back on the desktop or they relent, going to stay with 3.5.10 as long as possible and maybe move to Gnome.

  3. Matěj Laitl on 11 Oct 08 - 03:47

    As Alec already said, you don't need to mask anything in order not to install kde-4.1! Just ensure that for each kde-base/* package you also specify :3.5 slot in /var/lib/portage/world. A simple sed command would do that.

    And ben, as a gentoo dev, you should already have known that. ;)

  4. Caster on 11 Oct 08 - 09:47

    Or just have kde-meta:3.5 in world file...

  5. peakeyed on 11 Oct 08 - 13:26

    I run an automatic upgrade script.A lot of my kde pacakges are getting upgrade to 4.1.2. I have a stable 3.5.10 and wanted to keep it that way and was not interested in kde4.

    Am I screwed?

    How would I revert those upgrades. Will that mask file still work?

  6. Hanno on 13 Oct 08 - 08:53

    Missing in your mask:
    >=amarok-1.9
    kdepim-meta:4.1

  7. Clinton Skakun on 22 Oct 08 - 12:29

    It seems very slow on my HP workstation. The problem is Nvidia.

    I've switched to Xfce until KDE4.x can work it's self out.

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