Okay, seriously, KDE4 is really, really nice. I had been running from svn for the last few months and things tend to get crufty after a while of that… Unless you do a full uninstall and reinstall between weeks, things just kind of get progressively worse. Files get moved, libraries change names, you end up with broken stuff, etc., etc.

So I just started clean and rm -rf’d ~/.kde4, rm -rf’d my local kde4 installation, and used OpenSUSE’s excellent KDE4 repository for all of the KDE4 packages.

WOW! Clean, neat, nice, totally functional, wow, wow, wow! Excellent work, all involved!

And, best of all, we finally got mouse cursor changes to work without having to restart X!!!  Holy COW! I had no idea this was a new feature. I know it sounds a small thing to be excited about, but this is one of those little niggling annoyances (like having to restart Firefox to pick up a new theme) that just irritates ya. But no longer!

I must find who to thank for this and dispense a hug at our Launch Event next week!

Oh, and I forgot to mention… it looks like we don’t have quite all the keybindings available in the keyboard shortcuts configuration screen (minimize, maximize, send window X to desktop Y, etc.), so I am using my previous pet project, bbkeys (remember blackbox, anyone?), to do all of those nifty little keybindings. I can’t tell you how cool it feels to have written software 5+ years ago, not used it in at least 3, and be able to come back to it with pride, watching it being fully functional. Long live Open Source! =:D

bbkeys: ScreenHandler: in findSupportingWM.
bbkeys: ScreenHandler: first readSupportingWMCheck succeeded.
bbkeys: ScreenHandler: second readSupportingWMCheck worked.
bbkeys: ScreenHandler: Found compatible window manager: [KWin] for screen: [0].
bbkeys: ScreenHandler: Supported atoms: [65].