Ubuntu 8.04 is great; KDE4 not so much

On Thursday, the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 codenamed "Hardy Heron", will be released.

I decided to beat the rush and I upgraded to the release candidate yesterday.

Even though I beat the rush, I could tell I wasn't the only one doing it. The servers were kinda slow, which meant I spent a better part of the afternoon downloading updates. The actual install process, however, went without any problems.

Actually, I am more of a Kubuntu user than an Ubuntu user. Basically, there isn't much of a difference, except Kubuntu uses a different desktop environment than Ubuntu. Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop environment, Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop environment.

Improvements with 8.04 include upgrading many of the software programs. We have OpenOffice.org 2.4, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, GIMP 2.4.5, Inkscape 0.46, and many more. There are other significant additions and features, depending on whether you want Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

Just the new software versions alone are worth the upgrade.

I also decided to try out the newest version of KDE, which would be KDE4, instead of KDE3, which is what I have been running for the last several releases.

To be honest, I'm not as impressed with KDE4. Oh, it has some nice "eye candy" features, but as I said about Windows Vista, "Eye candy does not an operating system make." Some things are just different, and will take some getting used to. But one thing that is bothering me is I don't see to have as much customization control as I am used to. Maybe I just haven't found the right spot yet.

I will try to adjust to KDE4, and if I get too frustrated with it, I can always jump back to KDE3, which I still have installed. Hopefully, though, I can figure out how to work with KDE4.

Of course, people who aren't as familiar with KDE3 probably won't have any problems with KDE4. I just grew used to having some functions that I can't seem to find in KDE4 yet.

I guess I should also probably add that KDE4 is still optional. People who don't want to go to KDE4 can stick with KDE3, or they can use GNOME or Xfce.

Supplemental: After doing some reading, I found out that my first impression is right... KDE4 is missing a lot of customization features that I am used to. The reason they are missing is KDE4 has been re-written from the ground up, and they just haven't gotten around to adding those features... yet. That isn't to say that KDE4 isn't usable... it is, it just isn't as easy to customize. I've decided to switch back to KDE3 as my main desktop environment for now, but I will be popping into KDE4 every now and then to check on the progress.