I tried to use the KDE 4 beta for a complete workday. This was not an especially fair test, but fairness rarely survives curiosity. By lunch I had restarted Plasma twice and learned that my preferred panel arrangement could not yet be reproduced.

I began by importing settings from my normal KDE 3 account. The desktop behaved strangely: duplicated services appeared in menus, an application opened with the wrong font, and one configuration tool crashed. A clean user account fixed all three. Carrying years of configuration into a beta is not migration testing; it is inviting every old assumption to the same small party.

With clean settings, the underlying session is more stable than the desktop shell suggests. Applications launch, KWin manages windows reliably without effects, and Dolphin handles ordinary file work. Plasma remains the obvious construction site. Widgets can be added but are awkward to position precisely. Panel sizing is limited, and occasionally a widget stops responding until the shell is restarted.

That distinction matters because Plasma replaces several previously separate pieces: desktop icons, panels, applets and their containment. A failure in that young shell makes the whole environment appear dead even when applications and window management continue normally. It is a large architectural bet concentrated in the most visible square centimetres of the screen.

Restarting only Plasma from a terminal usually restored the workspace, which is useful for testing even if it is not a reasonable daily ritual.

I also encountered unfinished integration. Notifications differ between applications, removable devices do not always produce a useful action, and some settings change only after restarting a component. These are not dramatic crashes, but they interrupt the sense that one system is in charge.

After the experiment I returned to KDE 3 for work and kept the beta under a separate account for testing. KDE 4 is close enough that ordinary use finds valuable bugs, but not close enough that an ordinary user should be expected to diagnose them. My conclusion is candid: the beta contains a promising desktop framework and several usable applications, but it is not yet a dependable desktop. Calling it ready would be marketing; calling it hopeless would require ignoring everything beneath the panel.