Gentoo KDE 4.4 upgrade a day after

When KDE 4.4 was released a few days ago, I just had to try it out. Here is a brief outline of the installation og the unstable KDE 4.4 ebuilds and first day experience.

It started out with ebuild blockers, blockers and more blockers. All KDE 4.3.5 packages blocked the new 4.4 ebuilds. Some propose to remove 4.3 KDE entries from world and world_sets but it was not there. So I ended up creating a binary buildhost to minimize downtime for my laptop. Also with a binary buildhost I could run the same packages on the laptop and the desktop machine.

I only encountered one compile failure. PyQt4 failed with:

sip: QAbstractAnimation has not been defined

The simple workaround is to USE="multimedia" emerge -va PyQt4.

After a bit of messing around nepomuk/akonadi seems to be working, at least enough to start up Kmail.

So fairly quickly the KDE installation was ready to roll. I started out testing it with a full days work and I've only come across some minor new issues:

• KRDC seems to have lost the taskbar icon
• thumbnail bar in cover switch is missing too
• synchronization with Google data is still not working well enough to be useable (same issue with 4.3.5
• the comic strip plasmoid is still not working here, same with 4.3.5
• the weather applet is showing local weather again, but status icon is missing
• also it feels like 4.4 is a bit slower than 4.3.5 here with Intel GM965 and desktop effects enabled
• had to disable the blue window glow (System Settings > Appearance > Windows > Shadows tab)
• disabling the normal drop shadows also helped on responsivenes when changing windows
• clicking the kopete systray icon doesn't raise the main window as it did previously
• some fonts (at least in Konqueror) are no longer anti-aliased
• last but certainly not least 4.4 seems quite stable here, not having any major crashes yet

All in I'm quite satisfied with KDE 4.4, though nothing really groundbreaking. With a little bit of debugging and messing around KDE 4.4 is ready for production on my laptop. Good work KDE team and the Gentoo KDE herd!