Like this:

So, (almost) a year and a half has passed. When KDE 4.0 appeared, it disappointed many – me included. Of course, at the time I still wasn’t using Debian and wanted to test this new thing; if I had, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do so for a while and wouldn’t have been disappointed, but in the same time I wouldn’t have seen what was all the fuss about.
Anyway, how far have things gone? I am currently using Debian testing and KDE 4.2.2, which will soon be replaced by 4.2.4 . To be as short as possible, I will outline what is yet to be done, so that KDE once again becomes a complete and well-made desktop environment.
Where are the KDE multimedia apps? What is going on with Kaffeine, Kmplayer, Kmid? Not that I used any of these in KDE3, of course – mplayer is simply the best player out there, and while it is true that there are a bunch of front-ends, the best of which smplayer, mplayer works flawlessly via its CLI interface. I believe Kmplayer wanted to be a mplayer front-end, but from what I saw, the team had better not tried. Mplayer is a very powerful multimedia app, with may options and writing a GUI that won’t give user control to a tenth of those is of no use in my opinion. I haven’t heard the Kaffeine team working upon anything different from xine – not that xine is bad, but judging from my experience, mplayer is superior. Being able to play almost anything is not enough for me, mplayer plays absolutely everything and it does it flawlessly. Well, one day Kaffeine might use the mplayer engine, then I might give it another try. At the moment of writing this blog, however, there are no complete QT4 ports of those pieces of software.
Another good question is when Koffice will be usable. I have mentioned many times that I do not like using OpenOffice.org, because the software competes with M$ office and the interface can be improved, not just copied. Koffice will surely be one of the projects I will anticipate, but for now KDE4 has no complete office suite to offer.
In the development corner, it is pleasant that the Kdevelop is doing every effort to port this IDE to QT4 and the work will (hopefully) be finished soon. Yet, there are only non-KDE alternatives. (Personally I am not very affected, because I use Emacs, which does what it should and it does it well)
Up to now, there are no stable enough audio/video editing tools for KDE4. Sure, Kdenlive is a very promising project , but there is some work left.
I may have missed several things, but these are undoubtedly one of the most irritating missing components of the Kool K Desktop Environment. So we will wait for some time until KDE becomes the king once more.

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