I like KDE 4.3. Let’s make that perfectly clear, because after reading this, you might get the wrong idea.

KDE 4.3 ha a far more finished look and feel than 4.2. Things seem to be better integrated and the crashes are fewer, with fewer causes. I’ve finally got the hang of Dolphin (that tricky address bar, for one thing), and I even got Kscd to work.

But.

There are many annoyances as well:

• KMix mutes the master volume on every startup (I only have to unmute it and turn the volume up, but this is very annoying to do on every startup).
• Okular won’t accept (or remember) landscape print settings (Document Viewer from Gnome, that uses the same printer drivers, as far as I can tell,has no problems).
• The eye candy on Desktop settings usually crashes parts of the KDE environment, with the taskbar going first, if you try more than one or two settings.
• The PulseAudio/Phonon combo is very unreliable. With GStreamer, it won’t output sound, but with the Xine backend, it usually does.
• Amarok no longer knows how to play CDs. I tried to use Rhythmbox but it chops up CD audio in 15-second bursts with a 200 ms pause between every one, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

Some of the eye candy issues could easily be related to the (very) buggy Intel Xorg driver, but I still think that KDE shouldn’t crash as a result.

On the whole, I like the environment, though. 😉