I was a long time ex-KDE user, currently a GNOME user, who left KDE when 4.4.x made a mess of everything...right from the unbearable Akonadi-Nepomuk-Strigi trifecta, sluggish compositing, Plasma crashes etc. I gave up on 4.4.x and also 4.5.x...so much so that I became an avid GNOME user. Stability is important for me as I use Linux as my primary (and only) desktop environment at work. It is imperative that I be able to use emails, have a stable and fast environment for my development work as well. I had almost forgotten the DE that got me into Linux in the first place...KDE. That was till around 2 days ago when KDE 4.6 was released.

I was pleasantly surprised to find many of the kinks ironed out. Kwin's compositing is fast and smooth (I use Xrender instead of OpenGL which chokes on my Intel graphics card), Plasma is a LOT stable as compared to that I recall. Although Akonadi still sucks...but sucks a little less. I had a tough time trying to import my LDIF contacts to KAddressbook and have it show up in Kmail, but managed to get it working.

Most amazingly, KDE seems to have a far lesser memory footprint. I ran VirtualBox with Windows XP as guest and running Labview (my development tool) on my Thinkpad SL400c w/ 2GB RAM while running Amarok, Google Chrome, Kmail and it used around 1.4G of memory with no swapping.

I'm glad to see KDE progress this far and hope to stress it extensively in the next couple of days and see how far it works for me I sincerely do hope that KDE 4.6 brings me back again to KDE for good.

Great job KDE guys, keep it up...and now release KDE PIM fast

-Anshul

I'm a KDE user since 4.3 and I have to say that until now this is my favorite release. I sense somewhat a general performance increase and in this update, unlike previous ones, I just updated and it didn't broke anything nor my settings were out of place. I think finally KDE is getting stability.

Thanks to KDE Team.

I have been a KDE user since 2006. Before that I used GNOME for 1 year.
KDE 4.6 runs much faster than 4.5 , it's great.