"Trepidation. That about sums up the feeling of upgrading to a new version of KDE. You want to like it, but are afraid that whatever has been fixed will be counterbalanced by something rather sucky. This version of KDE has seen 16,022 bugs fixed and 1,723 new feature requests added, so the balance is in favour of not-sucky. Or is it?
F
"or the most part, the improvements in this version of KDE aren’t the things that you see, but the things that you don’t see any longer. Chief among the long list of user grievances in 4.4 was the behaviour of system notifications – no longer. Now the notifications look better and don’t clog up the screen for 10 minutes every time you try to copy a file somewhere it can’t fit.
"But the first thing you might notice about the new KDE happens long before that. In the lots-faster-but-not-actually-very-fast boot-up sequence, you’ll hear some audio; audio you can actually hear properly. Phonon now supports a PulseAudio back-end for sound – and while many apps don’t play properly with PA (not KDE ones, just apps in general) it does make for a better audio experience on KDE."
