Recently I had a system crash, possibly hardware-related, that destroyed my installation of Intrepid Ibex, so I had to reinstall it. That meant that I had no useful customizations -- I was starting all over (although I had preserved /home). And the more I worked with KDE 4.1, the more frustrated I got with all the missing features from KDE 3. So since I had no big investment in customization, I've wiped II and loaded Hardy Heron.
I find the plasmoid stuff mysterious, but that's my own fault since I haven't yet taken the time to really learn about it. Were that the only problem with KDE 4.1, I'd live with it and figure that after a while I'd put in the necessary effort. But the missing or degraded features are another story, and from what I read on the Net, some of these problems are unlikely to be fixed for a long time, if ever.
Let's start with the K menu, since that's the starting point anyway. The KDE3 K menu lets you choose a category, and when you mouse over it, the items in that category fly out. Not so with the KDE 4 K menu. You have to click on a category to see what's in it, and click again to get out of it if it's the wrong one. So scanning categories to look for something is quite a chore. The new K menu is a little prettier, but that hardly compensates for the loss of function. And when I posted a "bug" (request for flyouts), I got the answer that nothing was going to change -- the authors like it just the way it is. I cannot understand why the new version is considered an improvement -- though fortunately it's possible to go back to the KDE3 version, at least for now.
Then there's the Disks and Filesystems section of the System Settings. It simply went away in the Hardy -> Intrepid transition, with no indication that it ever will come back or even have a functional replacement. Sure, you can do those things by manually formatting partitions and editing /etc/fstab, but why should it be necessary when Kubuntu already included the facility in Hardy. I tried using the KDE3 installation for Intrepid but it didn't bring back Disks and Filesystems.
Annoyances continue, and I almost certainly haven't uncovered the last of them. Under KDE3 I was able to have a desktop background that faded from one color to another. Not in KDE4 -- and I shouldn't have to resort to GIMP to get that. Under KDE3 I could get the icons on my desktop aligned and sorted by name. Not in KDE4.
I guess that as new versions come out I'll try them to see if things have improved, but I won't repeat my mistake of actually installing them until I see that the annoyances are fixed.
I find the plasmoid stuff mysterious, but that's my own fault since I haven't yet taken the time to really learn about it. Were that the only problem with KDE 4.1, I'd live with it and figure that after a while I'd put in the necessary effort. But the missing or degraded features are another story, and from what I read on the Net, some of these problems are unlikely to be fixed for a long time, if ever.
Let's start with the K menu, since that's the starting point anyway. The KDE3 K menu lets you choose a category, and when you mouse over it, the items in that category fly out. Not so with the KDE 4 K menu. You have to click on a category to see what's in it, and click again to get out of it if it's the wrong one. So scanning categories to look for something is quite a chore. The new K menu is a little prettier, but that hardly compensates for the loss of function. And when I posted a "bug" (request for flyouts), I got the answer that nothing was going to change -- the authors like it just the way it is. I cannot understand why the new version is considered an improvement -- though fortunately it's possible to go back to the KDE3 version, at least for now.
Then there's the Disks and Filesystems section of the System Settings. It simply went away in the Hardy -> Intrepid transition, with no indication that it ever will come back or even have a functional replacement. Sure, you can do those things by manually formatting partitions and editing /etc/fstab, but why should it be necessary when Kubuntu already included the facility in Hardy. I tried using the KDE3 installation for Intrepid but it didn't bring back Disks and Filesystems.
Annoyances continue, and I almost certainly haven't uncovered the last of them. Under KDE3 I was able to have a desktop background that faded from one color to another. Not in KDE4 -- and I shouldn't have to resort to GIMP to get that. Under KDE3 I could get the icons on my desktop aligned and sorted by name. Not in KDE4.
I guess that as new versions come out I'll try them to see if things have improved, but I won't repeat my mistake of actually installing them until I see that the annoyances are fixed.
wmmount, automount? 
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