KDE Archive

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway.

For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.

The KDE project has announced that it has reached its one millionth commit to its Subversion repository, indicating that the KDE project is very healthy indeed. "This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors, "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world."

Whenever I use KDE, the part I dislike the most is the rendering engine used by Konqueror, called KHTML. KHTML just doesn't render pages as smooth and as well as Gecko and the KHTML fork WebKit, up to a point where I find Konqueror unusable as a web browser. However, work is underway to replace KHTML in Konqueror with WebKit, but according to KDE developer Adam Treat, this is a futile effort: Konqueror is too KHTML API specific.

The second beta for KDE 4.3 has been released. The highlights of this release are the integration of many new technologies, such as PolicyKit and Geolocation services, new window animation effects, a more usable run command popup, many new and improved addons in Plasma, Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications, and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform.

While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

It slipped by us, but the KDE team has released another minor bugfix release of KDE 4.2, version 4.2.3, a few days ago. Being a bugfix release, there are few user-visible changes, but still, there are a few things that stand out. "Online IMAP filtering in KMail has been fixed, KMail's system tray icon now reacts to changes to folder properties and updates the number of emails shown there automatically, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML - painting and interoperability with web standards has been further improved."

"At last year's Akademy the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide community of contributors and users who belief in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream."

My first thought was that this was an April Fool's joke, but as it turns out, this is real (I actually downloaded and tested it). The openSUSE KDE team has created a KDE 2.2.2 live CD using openSUSE 11.1 as a base. It boots like any other live CD, but instead of the latest and greatest KDE 3.x or 4.x desktop, you're presented with a fully functional KDE 2.2.2 desktop. That sure brought back some memories!

On Friday, KDE officially launched its version of Dell's IdeaStorm - KDE Brainstorm. In less than 24 hours, over 100 new ideas were proposed. "Getting the non-developer and developer communities really communicating is often a challenge, and KDE's approach is a great start. Developers now have an opportunity to hear what end-users want."

The release of KDE 4.0 was not a smooth one, and left a number of users a bit disgruntled. Still, the release showed so much potential that it was oozing out of every pixel. KDE 4.1 improved significantly in many areas of concern, but it wasn't yet ready for everyone. With today's release of KDE 4.2, the KDE4 vision is ready to face not only developers and enthusiasts, but every users. We have taken a look at the release candidate for KDE 4.2, and we have a short interview with KDE's Aaron Seigo.

The KDE project has released the first release candidate for KDE 4.2. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Cilense", (a.k.a. KDE 4.2 Release Candidate), the only planned release candidate for the KDE 4.2 desktop. Cilense is aimed at testers and reviewers. It should provide a solid ground to report last-minute bugs that need to be tackled before KDE 4.2.0 is released. Reviewers can use this release candidate to get a first look at the upcoming KDE 4.2 desktop which provides significant improvements all over the desktop and applications. It is not recommended for everyday use, however."

The KDE team has released the first beta of KDE 4.2, slated for release coming January. Quite a lot of new features have been added, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This release also makes a lot of strides to feature parity with KDE 3.x, by adding those small little features that KDE 3.x users are barely aware of, but which were missed in KDE 4.0/4.1, such as taskbar grouping, multiple rows in the taskbar, panel auto-hiding, a traditional icon desktop through 'full-screen' foderview, and so on.

PolishLinux site takes a look at KDE 4.2 based on the latest subversion branch and concludes: "As it can be seen, the KDE4 development is running at full throttle. KDE4.2 will include much enhanced functionality and versatility than KDE 4.1, but still a lot of work has to be done in many areas, especially when it comes to the stability of the applications." Hopefully some of the long standing stability and maturity issues with KDE 4.x branch are resolved before the GA release.