Yes it is…

As KDE4 (4.3.1) went stable on ~amd64 in Gentoo Linux, I accidently pulled it in and compiled it during my last emerge –update world. And as I had it installed I decided to just use it and make the full switch. Although it probably will have some bugs here and there, it seems to be pretty usable and it looks really damned beautifull. That again, comes with price: it’s slow. Interaction with the GUI is a litle bit unresponsive sometimes, but I guess I will get used to that. Most important applications are there and work. Only one important thing is still missing: a fully integrated KNetworkManager for KDE4. So long I’m using the KDE3.5 KNetworkManager, which works fine but looks a bit ugly. A good thing is, that power and display management seems to be integrated more nicely, the important special-buttons worked instantly.
I’m currently working on migrating all of the application-settings to KDE4.

I can see now why the Gentoo people will drop KDE3.5 out of the tree sooner or later. It just doesn’t make alot of sense to maintain something, that upstream doesn’t maintain anymore, or atleast not much.

update: disabling Nepomuk semantic desktop in the control panel (system settings->advanced->desktop search->enable nepomuk semantic desktop, uncheck) seems to increase performance and reduce power consumption.

Besides that, I had some free time at the it-sa security fair (where I gave a talk together with Daniel about our thesis) and coded some new features for wiki2beamer:

• selective slide compiling: mark a frame with a ! (!==== frametitle ====) to only compile the selected frame to latex. Speeds up compilation times during slide creation and also saves you battery when sitting in the train and making slides ;)
• shortcut syntax for \vspace and \vspace*: –2em– on a single line creates a vspace of 2em, –*2em– respectively creates a \vspace*
• shortcut syntax for \uncover and \only: +<2->{content} (uncover) and -<2->{content} (only)

As I once again hacked in the wiki2beamer code, it became clear that the code will become more or less unmaintainable. It’s just a matter of time until the complexity is too high. Wiki2beamer definitly needs a formal parser and syntax.