It was a joke. Only a few here hope for any bugs to be fixed and released, and most are new. I visit bugzilla like I do wikipedia, to document on known bugs.
Killing hildon-desktop does not touch widgets at all, those are part of hildon-home, the only "risk" is that rotation won't work properly till you reboot, and I found a workaround for that, basically, sleep 10; killall hildon-desktop, in the 10 seconds, switch to a portrait app so the desktop is killed while in portrait mode.