Nigel Henry wrote:
The second question, as I've seen a whole bunch of problems with KDE4 on mainly the Fedora list, but also on the Kubuntu list where folks using Hardy Heron 8.04 have decided to try KDE4, rather than the default KDE3.5, is, does KDE4 run ok on Don't Panic, without totally screwing up the desktop, that currently is working fine under KDE3.5?
As per Arch's own news announcement (http://www.archlinux.org/news/402/) KDE4 does not carry over your KDE3 settings. And even if you copy them over by hand, many of them appear to be inapplicable in KDE4 at best, and might even break stuff at worst. So yeah, it looks to me like KDE4 will "totally screw up your desktop that is currently working fine". If you want to stay with KDE3 short term, this forum thread tells you how. (i.e., add a bunch of Ignore's to your pacman.conf.) This will probably get a bit unwieldy to do long-term, however.
I suppose sooner or later I'll find some distro or other has KDE4 as default, and will have to go with it, but having seen many problems on the Fedora list, admittadly with kde-4.0, with promises that things would be better with kde-4.1, and of course Don't Panic is upgrading to kde-4.1.0-1, so perhaps I'm worrying about nothing.
I only gave KDE4 a cursory glance, but I have to say, so far I'm not that enamored with it, for the exact reasons you mention - i.e., "totally screw up your desktop that is currently working fine" - and without gaining much in return, near as I can tell. So I'm looking for a long term solution to stay on KDE3. The KDEmod repo is a possibility. A couple of things give me pause about using it though: 1) it's not really "stock" KDE packages; they're split into modules; they're heavily patched; etc., and 2) what I'd really like to do is be able to run KDE3 and 4 side-by-side, which I don't believe KDEmod will let me do. So I've actually been toying with the idea of starting my own repo to a) support KDE3 on Arch on an ongoing basis, and b) make it available side-by-side with KDE4, for people who want to potentially use both. This isn't as nutty as it sounds, as KDE3 development is probably drawing to a close pretty soon (it looks like maybe 3.5.10 is slated to be the last version in that series?) and so I'm guessing (hoping?) that the code won't require too much packaging and maintenance. I've even started taking some steps in that direction, and am starting to build the KDE packages with the mods I mentioned. (i.e., rename the packages to kde3-*, move them to a kde3 group, install them in /opt/kde3, etc.) I've got 4 of the 19 packages in the kde group done so far ... If anyone has any interest in using (or contributing help to) these packages, please let me know. DR