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openSUSE is the only distro that does its job. The job of a user-targetted Linux distribution is to make a pleasant experience for its users.
The KDE guys at openSUSE did an awesome job making KDE 4.0.4 a really nice release and they are still maintaining KDE 3.5.
The issues mentioned in the first article are solely Fedora's fault. First, Fedora 9 kicked KDE 3.5 in the butt -- propably because the maintainers are too lazy to work on two versions and thus leaving Fedora users of either using the old Fedora 8 release or move to KDE 4.0 entirely. Second, openSUSE produced lots of patches to polish KDE 4.0. Most of those patches were ignored entirely by other distributors. My guess is that it's because of lazyness, too.
I use openSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.0.4 and while there are a few glitches (most notably to me is the non-working Akregator, but I just installed Liferea to compensate), the overall experience is a pleasant one.
It's not a question of lazyness. It's just that upstream does not support it at all and there is no clean way to do it.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/KDE4/FAQ





Member since:
2005-07-06
I'm an openSUSE user and I began downloading and testing 11.0 back in the alpha stage. For every install I chose the KDE4 option for the DE. Now that I'm using the final release of 11.0, I'm also using the beta 2 of KDE4.
During the install, at the step where you choose which DE to use, it clearly states that 3.5 is the stable version and KDE4 is new and still in development.
KDE4 does have it's problems, but it is usable and doesn't crash on me at all. I can see why some people might not have the patience for these quirks, like some features visible but inop, or not being able to print from Okular (pdf reader).
I agree with the author from ArsTechnica mentioned in the LinuxHaters article. Keep an open mind and wait for the version that is described as "most problems are now fixed."
I'm also a MacOS X user.