KDE 4.2.0 on Gentoo a week (or so) after

First thing I noticed after starting to use KDE 4.2 as my everyday desktop was "Duh, no proper IRC client!". Bummer! Lately I'be been too busy with sorting out normal work life to hang out on IRC so it took me some time to discover this. I've heard that the latest SVN Konversation ebuild should work with KDE4, but haven't had the time to try it out yet as it depends on an unstable version of sandbox. For now I'm living without IRC, but hopefully that will change soon:)

In the following I'll try to describe some of my other experiences with KDE 4.2.0.

As I wrote in my first blog post about KDE 4.2.0 I'm not too fond of the Amarok2. I recently moved all my music to Ampache and have tried Amarok2 support for it. For the first search it works alright, but it always seems to display too few results on the second search and selecting any of them causes Amarok2 to crash. And I still really miss the old automatic playlists:(

My problem with Kopete and Jabber Gmail was finally solved! Somehow it worked when I just created a new account in Kopete with the same Gmail credentials, perhaps my own f....up or a Kopete quirk?

Konqueror works fine and is reasonably fast for me. The only problem so far is with tabbed browsing. When I close one tab it jumps back to the last active tab, but marks the next tab as read. Go figure, but no big deal.

Printing is still a mess. I can't seem to find the previous wizard to add new printers but even printing to PDF doesn't work as expected. I suspect this is because of my dark color scheme causing kwrite to write white letters. When printing to PDF files the only thing visible on the print out is the header and the footer.

As for eyecandy it's a lot more stable than 4.1.x but I've had Kwin and Plasma crash a few times, but they seem to recover alright afterwards.

Nepomukservices can sometimes bring the system almost to a halt but that's not nearly as often as with 4.1.x. For now Nepomuk results displayed in Krunner are more or less unreadable, so I'm not sure it's even worth enabling the Strigi daemon.

Some of the multimedia keys (volup+down) works out of the box with fancy popups, but sometimes it seems that the popup dies and is not working any longer.

Also for the rest of the day you can download the latest Linux Format which is dedicated to KDE here (ironically it doesn't render properly in Konqueror with dark color themes).

I'm still sticking with KDE 4.2.0 as my everyday desktop and enjoying most of it though:)