Up until the 4.0 release I had become an avid KDE user. Like most people, however, I was pretty dismayed at their choice to tag a feature incomplete, and horribly buggy release as 4.0. Yes they did come out and say it wasn’t ready for mass consumption yet, but they pretty much blew it by tagging it as 4.0, when really it was an early, early beta, or perhaps an alpha release — I won’t go on about since it’s already been discussed to death. KDE 3.5 held up fairly well for a while, but eventually Gnome surpassed it in terms of features, stability, and it remained lightweight yet had nice integration with Compiz, meaning I could still appease my inherent fascination with shiny things. So, I begrudgingly left KDE behind.

And now, KDE 4.2 is here, which is being touted as “The Answer” to all the critics. So is it?

First let me say that it really is a great release. It’s what a 4.0 beta should have been. It’s [mostly] stable, and [mostly] feature complete in comparison to 3.5. The new API changes are awesome — it’s an absolute joy to develop for. It’s got a solid foundation, and what they’ve built from it really is a technical achievement — they should be proud of their efforts. All the KDE4 applications have a consistent UI feel, and they all work in exactly the way you’d expect with regards to things like some of the more advanced drag ‘n drop features that OS X has supported for years (and that Microsoft still hasn’t caught on to).

My favorite thing: its window management is absolutely top notch. I thought nothing could beat Compiz, but the new KWin is pretty much perfect. It strikes a great balance between configurability and simplicity. The average user will never know 90% of the things it can do, but for those picky people among us it offers things like: an excellent focus-follows-mouse implementation, the ability to be able to easily set individual windows as on-top or below-others, and the ability to disable or enable window decorations on case by case basis, and that’s just for starters. KWin does everything I want, and more, yet it doesn’t suffer from the insane configuration and menu nightmare that is the Compiz configuration tool.

All that being said, my answer to the question is still a definitive “no”. KDE 4.2 is not The Answer. I am back in Gnome right now due to bugs. I really like konsole but the toggle that disables the menubar does not work, nor does the toggle that disables blinking text. There’s still no native network manager for those with wireless connections. The list of, admittedly minor, complaints goes on at length, and while none of them are a really big deal on their own, as a whole they leave me with a bad aftertaste in mouth… a taste that is reminiscent of an x.0 beta release, and not a .2 release.

However, this release does at least give me hope. I have faith in the KDE developers, and believe that their cause is a good one and a worthy one. They’re creating an excellent new foundation for what should become a consistent and unified interface experience — something Linux has sorely been lacking since the great KDE and Gnome divide began.