It works for me and I wouldn't go back to KDE3. I'm on OpenSuSE, though. I'm on 11.2 now and it just works. I don't understand all this criticism. Maybe a bad distro or resistance to new concepts, I don't know. Still, I have a few problems: Kaffeine does not handle well DVB TV (the KDE3 version was perfect) and I haven't found a use for Nepomuk. I hope 4.4 fix these minor problems.

Agreed, and there was no compelling reason to release a beta as a major release. It was confusing. Many apps remain for years in the 0.9x.x stage (Wine, for example) and yet they are widely used. 3.98 was a better numbering for KDE 4.0 and 3.99 for KDE 4.1. Anyway, I have been using KDE 4.0 on OpenSuse still in beta and then upgraded regularly without severe problems. Probably distros quality counts a lot when software is changing rapidly and needs good testing.

I had a similar experience. I wanted to fix the scanner dialog in swriter. I couldn't set the dpi value for my scanner. I fixed it and set an email to the most appropriate core developers listed on the OO developers site. I received an answer a month later or so, asking me to sign an agreement with SUN. At the same time I received an email from a developer who encouraged me to continue. I sent by fax the agreement and fixed several other things. The guy contacted me several times asking if I had received a response from SUN. I think I received it three months later. Meanwhile I had tried to scan directly from the dialog (which can only configure the scanner, scanning is started from another entry in the Insert image menu). The dialog doesn't return a value. How can I change it? It is impossible, the function prototypes are kept in a jar file. How long does it take to raise the interest of a core developer on this issue I don't know, but I think 6 months at least. Then OO 3.0 was out and I had to start it all over. But the code is really a mess: there are sections with comments in German tagged with: **********Better left alone******** and the like.