"Taskbar is part of the panel and what I was trying to say is that as soon as you have a certain number of applications open, their respective icons are not distinguishable from icons in other parts of the panel, leaving you with a large number of icons which looks overwhelming and cluttered. I mentioned separators between various aspects of the panel and these could help to know what's what."

Ah I know what you mean now. I've got around that in 4.2 by putting the Taskbar in a panel almost on its own - I only have the K menu in with it. The other stuff like clock, power, network, devices... I put into a different panel and put it up the right of the screen. Just thought I'd suggest that here for other people struggling with the transition.

"My file manager is cp, mv, ls, dd and rm (plus cat and grep) and I'd like to use it on pluggable devices before starting Dolphin."

Agreed, but again here's something to ease the pain: have you tried hitting F4 in a Dolphin window? You then get a command line where the directory stays in synch (both ways) with the GUI pane.

I agree the whole mount/unmount thing in KDE 4's GUI is broken. The way GNOME does it by default is excellent (but that's the only thing I like about GNOME. :-)

Zack