The End is Nigh!
For application developers, the biggest problem in the past two years has been that we could not develop against released KDE packages. We had to keep up with the joneses: keep checked out qt-copy, kdelibs, kdesupport, kdepimlibs and kdebase, keep them compiled, just to be able to get to a point where we could work on KOffice.
It's unavoidable, of course, and not a big problem for me personally. This dual core X61 61 bits OpenSUSE tablet can compile kdelibs before breakfast (if I start the compile before going to bed). By the way -- with the current kernel, OpenSUSE is incredibly stable. Suspend and resume is as reliable as with my old Pismo Powerbook under OS X -- and faster.
But it makes it really hard to attract new developers, people who'd like to report a bug and are prepared to compile koffice svn just to check whether it's already been fixed. Those are the people who tend to stay around and even help out with development after a while. Asking them to also compile all of kde is often just a bridge too far.
But yesterday night I managed to clean out my installation of all previous attempts, install the OpenSUSE KDE4 rc2 packages and succesfully compile KOffice against them. Yay! We're getting really close to the end of the road, and I'll try to keep developing against released packages only from now on.
It also marks my switch to KDE4 as my default environment. Things work quite well. Oxygen is drop-dead gorgeous, especially after making the window color #CFCFCF. I love all the subtle details. I wish I could have the scrollbars always in the gorgeous green color, instead of only when I hover over them. KWin's effects work great on OpenSUSE. Kickoff has completely won me over: I've added a couple of favourites, and that made all the difference. Dolphin rocks -- I hadn't expected that, I must admit.
Sure, there are irritants: the fish kio slave doesn't seem to work. I get a login prompt, but no directory listing. The panel is a little high, especially on my 1024x768 screen. I cannot get the pager to show up to the right of the K-menu button. Migrating my feed list from akregator3 to akregator4 baffles me. KWrite doesn't word-wrap, but glyph-wrap. There are still lots of glitches and bugs -- but life is very much worth living, and I salivate at the thought of what goodness will be built on top of these foundations.