Observations on KDE 4.1:
1. Everytime I restarted, Kate (the editor) and Kopete kept starting up: I didn’t find any references to these programs in the regular location (.kde4/Autostart), so I did a grep on ps (as in ‘ps -e | grep kate’ and ‘ps -e | kopete’), killed both instances and this seems to work. There’s probably a file (cache) related to this, but you know, this is Linux and it doesn’t hurt to kill an app so once in a while.
2. The Wifi Manager: Don’t forget to install the WIFI manager (KWifiManager): it doesn’t get installed by default! Additionally, to force autoconnection to your router, you must store the router password in KWallet.
3. I cannot stand the fact that if I choose to Shutdown KDE, that I have to confirm this in a second dialog box.
4. Both Dolphin and Gwenview currently don’t support RAW image view or thumbnail generation. Nautilus (Gnome’s filebrowser) does.
5. If you keep the control key pressed for a couple of seconds, Konqueror will show the shortcut keys for all links and buttons currently in view. This works pretty good.
KDE starts up pretty fast but takes a while to close off, that is, longer than shutting down Gnome. I’ve seen Windows Vista take longer to close off. Heck, even KDE starts up faster than a (fully) loaded Windows XP. Additionally, I have the feeling that (for example) Konqueror doesn’t properly dispose of its resources. However, I will readily admit that I made KDE the default desktop environment for this computer.
No, that’s because of X sessions. (.sessionrc or .session). IIRC go to the control panel, or what it’s called and disable one of the session manager options.
Right. If only they hadn’t drastically changed Kcontrol. It doesn’t even exist!
What really bites is that neither Dolphin nor Konqueror or Glenview supports thumbnail generation of RAW images. For this, I need to invoke Nautilus…
But for the rest, KDE looks a lot more streamlined than Gnome.