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Found lots of KDE4 clips on youtube. Not sure what major UI changes the dude expects that he looks for 4.9 clips a day after release. Just have a watch at the KDE4 clips and be fine. They are not (so) different from 4.9 especially since its all customisable and most seem to tweak the default settings anyways before recording making it hard to guess what KDE 4.x they where actually using (bugfixes and performance-improvements are not direct visible in videos anyways if you not direct compare cases).
They could definitely make use of a better theme and a help of a graphics designer. In the video, KDE 4.9 looks "flashy", perhaps even "impressive", but I would never called it "pretty", "elegant" or "clear".
Last time I tried KDE 4.8 it took me about an hour to switch off most annoyances (overload of animations, transparencies, features I would never use anyway) and install more sensible Plasma and Qt themes (it is hard, if possible at all, to find good ones, especially for Plasma). The sad result was that the "core" I've got wasn't particularly good because all the development steam apparently went into parts I've just switched off.
and I am sure that if KDE takes YOUR custom settings and makes them the default another user would write exactly the same "review" you did complaining that the defaults are not what he prefers.
At least its all highly customizable and so everybody can tweak it to whatever they prefer. Personally I love to have the freedom to do so.
Edited 2012-08-02 07:01 UTC
You are hardly the only person that has a problem with this. I am just reading Ars technica article about 4.9, and about one half of comments on first page are about "how ugly KDE is".
Some are really harsh:
And so on ...
It is strange that KDE puts so much effort in creating great technology, but for the most part ignores visual appeal. And distributions mostly just ship default build. Open Suse is the most obvious exception, but sadly Open Suse doesn't work well on my laptop.
I think of it (the lack of videos) as a good thing. Visually there is nothing new in 4.9, any videos out there that were recorded during previous release cycle will look identical to 4.9. It means that KDE is not focused on adding new features but on polishing existing ones and making internal optimizations.





Member since:
2005-09-27
And all you can hear are the crickets, there was a time KDE was a lot more popular, now sadly, the only KDE 4.9 video in youtube (discarting that dreamdesktop bs) was running in GNOME Shell, yes, there are more GNOME Shell youtube videos than KDE 4.8 and 4.9 together.
So, I guess KDE user have just moved on.