A first look at KDE 4 beta 2

As part of Ars Technica's continuing coverage of the KDE 4.0 development cycle, I took the opportunity today to sit down with a fresh build of KDE 4 from KDE's publicly accessible source tree. My tests are conducted on a 64-bit Kubuntu 7.04 system with very few modifications other than the installation of a bunch of -dev packages that were required to build the many parts of KDE 4. I built the whole thing to be self-contained within a single user's home folder, so that I can safely test it without making any permanent changes to my otherwise perfectly functional KDE 3.5.7 machine. To my surprise, today is the first day that I can say that I'm really comfortable using KDE 4, which is good news for the KDE community at large who have (up until recently) been somewhat afraid of 'eating their own dog food' and using KDE 4 full time. Beta 2 was tagged last week, so the sources that I am testing are fairly similar to that release, which will be announced with packages for many distros early this week.