I installed a pre-alpha KDE 4 SVN snapshot on a spare partition because running it beside my normal files seemed like a more entertaining mistake than merely reading about it. The announced alpha release was due the next day; this was still a snapshot from the day before. The packages installed cleanly, the session appeared in the login manager, and that was approximately where normality ended.

My naive plan was to reproduce my KDE 3 setup immediately: restore the same panel arrangement, point everything at the same home directory, and judge whether the new desktop was faster. That plan survived for perhaps ten minutes. Several settings had no equivalent, applications still looked inconsistent, and the desktop shell was plainly being assembled while I watched.

What does work is more interesting than the rough edges. Qt 4 painting feels noticeably less burdened when windows resize. The new artwork gives the session a coherent direction rather than the collection-of-themes appearance I feared. A few applications already show cleaner separation between their data and their widgets, which should matter long after the screenshots stop being novel.

What does not work is still substantial. The panel is not something I would trust for a working day. Desktop actions occasionally disappear. Some configuration modules are present but ineffective, a particularly refined form of optimism. Logging out once left processes behind, which then made the next login look broken until I killed them from a console.

This is not KDE 3 with fresh icons. KDE 4 is changing the toolkit, desktop shell, hardware and multimedia layers, and a fair amount of application plumbing at once. That explains why familiar checkboxes cannot simply be carried over. It also means measuring this snapshot as a replacement desktop misses the point.

After a second installation with a clean test user, many of the mysterious failures vanished. Sharing an old configuration directory had introduced stale service files and assumptions from KDE 3. The snapshot still crashes and still lacks ordinary conveniences, but at least those failures now belong to the new code rather than to my archaeological collection of dot files.

Don’t install it on the account used to earn money. Still, the architecture is visible enough to poke at, and a bug report from a clean account may help. Complaining that a pre-alpha snapshot is unfinished is accurate, but not exactly investigative journalism.