After playing around with plasmoids, akonadi and other new KDE4 features I noticed that all the components and applications seem stable and well integrated. It's awesome to use dolphin to browse local files as well as windows shares, FTP servers and SFTP sessions and use these URLs in every location widget. It's nice how Akonadi resources map remote calendars and allow access to applications like Kontact. By integrating a lot of functionality which had in previous versions been provided by 3rd party projects KDE now looks and feels polished and clean.
Comparing the KDE experience with Windows XP, I'd claim that the consistency level is more or less equal. On the one hand, Linux provides not only Qt/KDE applications and it'll prove difficult to avoid for example Gtk applications like Firefox. This can be partly circumvented by using a Gtk engine which borrows appearance settings, including icon sets, from the current KDE theme. But what about Tk or wxWidgets? Well, it's hardly the job of a desktop shell's team to worry about the integration of competing widget sets and toolkits as long as their own is feature complete. This brings us to the Windows world. Regular Win32 applications might all look the same if they follow the restrictions of the provided toolkit but in reality with most of the applications I find myself working with every day I'm overflowed by a variety of inconsistent user interfaces. This was accurately described in an ars article some time ago. It might not be Microsoft's job to tell 3rd party vendors how to style their user interfaces, but if they fail to have a consistency even across their very own applications they really shouldn't be spreading open source inconsistency FUD in magazine ads.
No matter how well KDE has progressed so far, at the end of the day I logged off my machine without having once started the dolphin file manager, without having searched for files in nepomuk and without having consulted klipper's neat clipboard management. Heck, I didn't even take a peek at the nice plasmoids on my desktop. No doubt, KDE offers a great platform for building desktop distributions with the regular user in mind who uses the mouse frequently enough in order to enjoy its features. But I use the mouse only if an application forces me to - like most aspects of a web browser - and spend the rest of my time in a virtual terminal. As soon as you notice that something isn't necessary, you wish to get rid of it which is when I started to get home sick and switched back to Enlightenment DR17 (E17).
Despite its focus on speed, E17 seems to grow into another desktop shell also providing its own file manager and lots of fancy animations, icons and even a pretty widget set. This mix of eye candy and sleekness positions it right between a bare window manager and a desktop environment like KDE, gnome or Xfce. However, I couldn't care less about speed running it on a modern Core 2 workstation, else I'd use a traditional stacking window manager and would in fact be using openbox or even a tiling window manager.
E17 offers a rich configuration interface, a powerful module API and the right amount of visual effects to aid the understanding of what's going on with your windows. I just need to get used to the new "Everything Launcher". Oh, and I haven't found out how to fill-maximize windows vertically or horizontally which is something I was able to do with enlightenment_remote in E17 three years ago before the switch to dbus calls. I haven't yet found the option to set such a key binding. But more on that in a future post...
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