KDE 4 is shaping up nicely and I must admit that the look and feel is great. After using it for a while however there are still several things missing that are keeping me on the fence regarding running KDE 4 vs the KDE 3.5 backports in Kubuntu 10.04.

1. Missing KIO Slaves and plug-ins for konqueror
   1. No locate kio slave.
      In kde 3.5 you can type locate:/*.pdf and instantly all of the pdf files on your system are displayed in sub-folders. Having locate built into konqueror is awesome and hard to live without.
   2. KIM and KIPI
      In kde 3.5 installing kipi and kim allows you to right click on an image or selection of images and convert them to various formats, resize them, upload them to facebook, turn them into an album ...etc. Really I just miss the resize and convert capabilities as I can still do everything else in digikam.
2. Missing Features for Konqueror
   1. Local search filter.
      In kde 3.5 a local search filter is displayed whenever you are browsing a file system. This another super powerful feature that I am really missing.
      To enable local search make sure you have konq-plugins and konqueror-plugin-dirfilter enabled.
      Open konqueror browse to a directory ie. ~/ and select settings > configure toolbars.
      Select Filter Toolbar <DirFilter> and add filter Field to the Current Actions.
      Done, enjoy your new dir filter.
   2. Terminal Emulator
      In 3.5 the terminal emulator follows browsing. If you click on a folder you can see the terminal cd to that folder. I so miss this. I can tell you how many times I will browse to where I want to be and try to run a command from the terminal only to realize that it is not in sync with my current location.
3. Auto Mounting / Unmounting
   In 3.5 USB Thumbdrives and CD/DVDs auto-mounting places an icon on the desktop. This is super user friendly especially if you have a lot of thumb drives plugged in. Plug in a new one, and it appears on the desktop and you instantly know where it is. In KDE4 you have a stupid task bar device notification thing just like windows (which sucks). Plugin a couple of devices and it is very easy to forget which is which in the list. The way it was was more intuitive.

It is a pretty small list, but these are serious functionality issues for me. KDE 3.5 has had a long time to mature and for being brand spanking new KDE4 is amazingly complete and functional. Being open source I can still run KDE3.5 on my new system if I want and it is always nice to have that option, but it is so so close.