KDE 4.2 on Gentoo

While my life workwise is all messed up(tm) some days ago I had the chance to update my laptop to KDE 4.2 and here is my initial thoughts.

The upgrade itself was a bit rough, so unmerged 4.1.x before emerging 4.2. Installation went without any major problems, once the blockers were solved. One thing I immediately noticed was that many of the small issues that plagued KDE 4.1.x was now gone. Indeed KDE 4.2 is almost ready for everyday use.

One of the KDE applications that I use a lot is Kmail and the latest version really got a few new nice features that I really love.
The first is the Message list now got tab support. This is great of you're like me and have hundreds of IMAP folders. Just opening the most important in each tab saves time. Also you can now manually sort the Mail folders list.
Previously it's always annoyed me that the Local folders always had to be sorted on top of my other IMAP accounts. Now you can manually sort Accounts as you like, you can even manually sort each folder or sub folder.
Also IMAP seems more stable than ever, though still not perfect.
On the down side I still haven't found a way to make Kmail hide unsubscribed IMAP folders.
Running out of free space on /home can still wipe your Kmail configuration though. I learned this the hard way, when kio_imap4 went logging crazy and wrote 25G of errors to the .xsession-errors file in a few hours:-/
I've tried to get Korganizer use my old ical based calendar stored on an IMAP server but to no avail yet. Instead I've messed around wit syncing to Google Calendar and perhaps I'll write a bit about that later.

Apart from that I've noticed a few other random things.

The new Digikam 0.10.0 seems very nice and stable already in RC2. The only real killer feature missing is merging of databases. So when you're out you can deal with only part of your collection and then merge back the changes once you return home. For now I've hacked up a few scripts to grab some information from one SQLite file and insert into the master SQLite file. I still haven't checked wether the old scripts work with the newest version though.

I still have to get used to Amarok2 and some of the new interface and missing automatic playlists but Ampache support at least seems to be working nicely. I still think I liked the old Amarok better.

Enhanced krunner, though some actions are not triggerd by return and some icons are layered on top of each other.

Taskbar at last got the auto hide function that were present in all pre 4.x releases, nice.

Using find in Konqueror no longer brings up a new dialog window, but displays an extra search bar at the bottom of the browser window, like Firefox.

OpenGL support is much this time around. Videos played in vlc are now properly displayed and not on top of everything like in KDE 4.1.x.

Also I love the new enhanced cover switch function with thumbnail bar on top. To always enable the thumbnail bar, disable "Dynamic mode" in the configuration screen.

However it seems like some SSL stuff is b0rked. The absolutely most striking bug I've found so far is that apparently adding new SSL certificates is still not supported in Konqueror/Kleopatra. This results in always having to accept certificates when I start up Kmail. See KDE bug #162485 for the gory details. Also Kopete refuses to connect to Google Talk using SSL. Perhaps the same issue?

So to sum it up. Syncing PIM data is still a mess, though hopefully Akonadi will help here in the future. Also the SSL issue is a serious issue for daily use. But apart from that KDE 4.2 is quite useful.