Yeah, now I remember, I removed KDE 4 and its clocks [1] from my memory (it actually made me switch to Gnome and never went back) [1] basically the initial 4.0

Yeah, now I remember, I removed KDE 4 and its clocks [1] from my memory (it actually made me switch to Gnome and never went back) [1] basically the initial 4.0 release (which was a rewrite from scratch for the UI/Desktop component) was not usable at all as a daily driver, lots of crashes and missing features. The only thing that worked well from the start were the clock widgets, and they were showcased a lot in screenshot. I think it even reached some kind of meme status by KDE 4.1. But I cannot find any blog post / rant from the time, my search-fu is not that good.