KDE Archive

In his lengthy and interesting blog post covering the future of Plasma, KDE's Aaron Seigo proposes Qt Quick and QML (a declarative language that embeds JavaScript) as replacement of the Graphics View architecture currently used by Plasma. This holds a promise of massive speedups and cheap effects as all paint operations become candidates for OpenGL acceleration, contrary to the aging Graphics View architecture that is still stuck with various inefficiencies caused by the underlying QPainter approach. Expressiveness and easy programmability of QML is a nice bonus, of course.

"When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities. With the release of KDE 4.5, Plasma has reached a much higher level of maturity, and activities can now be integrated with virtual desktops, dual monitor screens, and with the Dashboard feature."

KDE reaches out to another device form factor. Plasma's plugin-based design is at work again, after launching KDE special netbook interface. This time around, the KDE team presents its Plasma Tablet interface.

"We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."

KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.

"The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5 has got in store for us."

"The developers behind the KDE desktop environment have released the first beta of version 4.5. Although the major focus during this development cycle is stability, the release also brings some nice new features and user interface improvements."

"The KDevelop team is proud and happy to announce that KDevelop 4.0 is finally available as stable release. KDevelop comes with lots of innovative features, even though many features from the 3.5 series were dropped due to a nearly complete rewrite. In particular the developers have focused on building an excellent C++ IDE instead of trying to integrate lots of languages and features halfheartedly. Of course KDevelop 4 also builds an excellent basis for other languages, the best proof for that is the PHP plugin that is released alongside KDevelop 4.0. KDevelop 4.0 has an excellent C++ code understanding engine, which allows the IDE to understand your code better than you do, and which is then used to assist you by releasing you from tiresome tasks."

"This month's edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.4. KDE SC 4.4.1 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE SC 4.4.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.4.1 multi-language support is more complete. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come."

And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE. Major new features include social networking and online collaboration integration, the new netbook interface, the KAuth authentication framework, and a lot more.

Since the stream of news is still pretty much dry, I figured I'd throw in something I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, but really didn't dare to: KDE4's performance. Since experiences with KDE4 seem to widely differ between people, it might be a good idea if we, together, can find a common cause among those of us having problems.

Over the weekend, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4 beta 1. "Today, KDE has released a first preview the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), 4.4 Beta1 The first beta version of KDE SC 4.4 provides a preview and base for helping to stabilize the next version of the KDE Desktop, Applications and Development Platform."

"I have managed to find some time to cover the recent changes in the development version of KDE 4.4. The number of changes is not impressive but they are interesting enough to write an article."

We all know what KDE stands for, right? Unless you're new here, you'll know that it stands for the K Desktop Environment. While this certainly covers a large chunk of what KDE stands for, it has increasingly lost its meaning over the past few years. Consequently, the KDE team has decided to 'reposition' the KDE brand.