KDE 4.0 RC1 has been released. "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase. The KDE Development Platform, comprising the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality." You want see Plasma panel? You get see Plasma panel!
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Member since:2005-07-13
Cmake simplified the process, but I don't think it was necessarily the primary driver. I know that there are test builds already for Windows, and that KDE will compile with either gcc or msvc; it will also build on OSX and there are test builds available as well.
The kde libraries will be ported to Win and OSX, and this will allow many KDE apps to be easily ported with minimal effort to run natively on each platform. You can expect to see Konq, Amarok, KOffice etc. In this aspect, KDE will be more of an application environment than a desktop environment.
This doesn't mean everything will be ported, and there are some apps within KDE that simply wouldn't make sense running on a non-*nix platform, particularly the desktop itself.
I think some of the real magic for this cross-platform portability (aside from Qt4) is the work that was done with abstraction layers like solid or phonon. These permit the developers to create or port apps without necessarily needing to address the underlying platform. Simply port the libraries.
I wouldn't necessarily expect KDE 4.0 on Windows and OSX at launch, but I wouldn't expect it to be too far behind.
My personal opinion is that the KDE community at large could benefit from the wider exposure of key apps like Konqueror or KOffice running on multiple platforms, so I see this as a good thing. And if KDE4 can prove itself to be a powerful cross-platform application environment, similar to the "ideal" of write-once compile-many, it could benefit the free desktop community at large.
Member since:2005-10-13
The KDE developers basically just wanted to use anything but autotools, which apparently wasn't scaling well to a project the size of KDE with all it's various needs and was causing all kinds of problems, like creating hundreds of KB of config files just for a simple hello world app. A few different systems were looked at but eventually CMake was chosen because it seemed to work fairly well and the CMake developers reached out and promised to implement any missing features KDE wanted to have added. The fact that it can generate VS project files was a nice bonus, but not really the driving force behind it's choice.
I believe the plan is to leave Windows (and presumably OSX) applications in beta status for quite some time, with a final release sometime around the 4.1 timeframe. Or whenever they feel the apps are stable. I don't think there's been very much testing on non-unix platforms, so the timeline might change quite a bit after they get 4.0 released and people get to have a better look at everything.
Member since:2006-03-05
At least two KOffice developers develop solely on OS X -- without the other (linux-based) developers noticing anything until we met in person. There is also a KOffice developer working on Windows. There are portability issues being worked out all the time, like Visual C++ not supporting using 'and' instead of && and things like that.
Member since:
2006-07-26
I remember reading that moving to cmake was part of some big plan to bring kde to Windows. Is that still true?