That's just not true. Most of KDE's 3->4 rewrite was about rewriting from Qt3 to Qt4 for better API and also introducing abstraction layers like Solid and Phonon only and only for the sake of API stability.
Well i witnessed more than one project just up and dump any pretext of supporting KDE3 once KDE4 was announced.
If the APIs were stable, there would not be a need to drop one for the other.
Look at the kernel, there have never been a situation where one have to go "sorry, but i only support X+1 from now on".
Similarly, until the 64-bit version, and that in turn was because of hardware not software, one could run binaries from Windows 3.0 (at least) on present day Windows.
That is the kind of stability i am talking about. That is the kind of stability that get third parties to stay with a platform.
Yeah, I wish they had gone from Qt3 to Qt4 without redoing the entire UI at the same time. This is doubly true of the apps: Amarok 1.4 was, imo, the best music player I've used while Amarok 2.0 was buggy and slow and had none of the things I liked about 1.4
I was looking forward to kde4 until the slow/buggy reality hit. Maybe it was my graphics drivers, but the kicker successor never delivered for me. I switched to fluxbox for a while, and then gnome as it was and has stayed in a better state thanks to the install base on Ubuntu. Haven't looked again at kde since.
That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)
Once I had compiz working, it's been gnome exclusively.
Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.
Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.
I should say that I actually like quite a bit about GNOME. I'm even a fan of mutter and GNOME shell (especially with gtile). I just wish I could decouple it from the rest of GNOME.
I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned Haskell, it's really very nice.
