KDE 4 - still no thanks (yet)

As I was hit by KDE4 due to the ~arch keyword on my gentoo box in october, I was playing with KDE4 for quite a while. I even had the two versions in parallel. But due to starting up wrong version of binaries due to PATH issues, I am pretty fed up with testing. Unmerging the whole KDE stuff would be a simple thing, but I want to keep KDE 3.5 as I am working on it.

As I am a gentoo user, I know about masking unwanted packages. For making it simple, I had to abuse eix a little:

eix -C kde-|grep "\[[IU]\]"|awk -F" " '{print $2 ":4.1"}' > /etc/portage/package.mask/kde4

Portage allows to split our package.mask files into several files. The reason why I am using a separate mask file here is that I might want to remove the whole KDE4 mask at once as soon as things are usable again. The procedure of emerge -C, emerge –depclean, emerge -uDNav world and finally revdep-rebuild takes quite some time, but cleaning up the mess is quite important for keeping the system alive.

As the cpu gets idle again, my system has lost quite some weight and the previous errors just disappeared. Sure, the whole experiment was quite some work, but I don’t look back in anger as it was a fine experience and a nice preview on things to come. KDE4 is on the way to grow up to be a usable desktop environment.