What's new in kde4.4?

Question

As a long time kde user I was bewildered by some of the things that hit me when I fired up kde4.4.
To kick the changes off I was impressed by the new netbook setup which one call up seemlessly and which relies on the new search and launch activity:
systemsettings - desktop - workspace - form factor: netbook
But there are plenty of other things that I have seen in this forum but have no idea how to implement yet - among them tabbing applications! So, if you have found something cool, tell us how to do it and post a screenshot (best use http://omploader.org/)

Answer 1

Usability - love it. Nothing better than KDE. I've really missed the immense configurability and it looks like there is more to play with and make good use of in 4.4 than ever. Dolphin remains my favourite filemanager. It does everything better. Akonadi looks more usable now too. I really like the opposite philosophy they've taken to cloud computing and taking activities that are in the cloud and integrating it into the DE. Thumbs up for the social desktop.
Polish - The best. So many cool details woven into the DE since the early days of 4.1. I also love the developments made on bespin since I last updated it (stopped doing that when kde-base became a dependency and I wasn't using it), new icon sets from kde-look are amazing and that's besides the fact that I really like what they've done with the default oxygen-air setup. A thing of beauty. Think it can win over a lot of non-linux users to look at a kde box, even without modification.
Stability - I am not impressed. Two random dolphin crashes, okular crashed, krunner stopped working when I activated desktop effects and chromium simply disappeared from the menu after I added the launcher to the panel. All this in the first hour. Still these are details I imagine will be ironed out with the next bugfix release.
Speed - This is where I am the big loser. I've grown accustomed to the near instant responsiveness of my xfce+compiz setup by now and I think I will just have to come to terms with the fact that KDE is not designed for proper use with a 1.73 Ghz celeron processor as my laptop has.
By now, I'm afraid responsiveness is a stronger feature for me than the aforemented. I will toy with it a bit more before going back to the poorer world of gtk, but I do wish it could be more responsive. Last time I tried Gnome, it fared quite a bit better in this department and if they had been evenly matched, I think the plusses might outweigh the lag for me to stay put (I realise curit would be nice if they had been more evebrent gnome can not compete with the features of kde 4, but still).
Still, I genuinely do believe that KDE 4 is currently the most advanced and shiny DE out there on any platform. If I had a more powerful machine I would use it without question. It seems to be getting better and better.