On July 29th the KDE team will announce the final release of KDE 4.1, the first usable version of the fourth generation.
To make it possible for Arch users to join the release party in time, there are packages for 4.1 in our [testing] repository. Please take this chance to test those and report any packaging bugs using the bug tracker.
Before you update you should read the following hints:
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This update will NOT be smooth. Not all config files of the old KDE are compatible with 4.1. While the old are kept in ~/.kde the new ones are in /~.kde4. They won't be converted automagically. You could try to copy some files manually and see what happens. This might work for kmail, konqueror and others, but will break things for others. Maybe KDE will release a tool for doing this.
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If you want to use the KDE desktop make sure you have kdebase-workspace installed, which includes the kdm, the taskbar etc.
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if pacman wants to replace packages: Answer YES :-)
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At the time of writing not all KDE-based packages have been rebuilt for use with new KDE or "legacy libs". If you cannot wait, installing kdelibs3 should make them work. But this will be fixed in the repos before things are pushed to [extra] of course.
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If you start KDM with inittab make sure to change its path from /opt/kde to /usr
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Don't force the upgrade ( -f); report a bug instead
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You might want to (re)move your ~/Desktop folder if you don't like that folder view
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The first login takes a while; don't worry about this. It's creating new configs etc.
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If you use an nvidia card, please read http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/GPU-Performance
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For a short overview about the new features read http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/