Since the release of KDE4.0 I'm astonished by the ugly ui compared to KDE3.5. Yes, it was so ugly that the first thing I need to do with KDE4.0 was to change the style from Oxygen to something KDE3 had (Oxygen icons are good, but the color style, widget style and window decorations, lots of them, well, far from good.) KDE 4.1 and 4.2 changes a lot, but IMO they're worse, or at least looks nothing better than KDE 4.0.

KDE 4.3 finally fine-tuned most bad-designed colors and gives us a good color style. though the window decoration is still ugly, it is much better than previous versions. Performance has improved and font rendering bugs are fixed with Qt 4.5. Especially, many UI improvements bring KDE4.3 much more closer to KDE 3.5, thus much more easy to use.

Two years ago I thought KDE 4.3 would be the first KDE4 version which is useful to average users. Now I know I'm right, thanks to KDE4 developers.

I think Oxygen (the window decorator) is one of the most attractive styles I've seen on any operating sytem, and while I thought Oxygen (the plasma theme) could be better, I still prefered it over what most other operating system/desktop enviroments came with. I was hesitant to use KDE in the past because the screens I saw of KDE3 turned me off, and when I finally saw it person (after having already fallen in love with KDE 4.2) I was still turned off by it. So, to each their own.

Ironically, I see this release as a step further from KDE 3.5. I agree, though, that Air is leaps and bounds over Oxygen. I'm glad you're finding some comfort in KDE 4 now.

Hint: remove the blue stripes on the active window. In my opinion it'll make the window decoration much better-looking.

Right click on window decoration -> Configure Window Behavior... -> Windows -> Uncheck "Show stripes next to the title".

It looks better and works better, BUT...

Do you want to see 2 crash reports?

Off course KDE 4.3.2 in October (Kubuntu Karmic Koala or K.K.K. 9.10 ) will be more stable, but not enough...