KDE Archive

"After three weeks of using KDE 4 on my laptop, I continue to find new features and changes. I am aware of the dictionary of special names that make up the back end of the new KDE - Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon, and the rest - but just as often as the major features, it's the little items that I find welcome as much as the large ones. Increasingly, I'm looking at KDE 4 as a statement about what a desktop should be, and contrasting it with my own ideas on the subject."

KDE 4.0.3 has been released. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.3, the third bugfix and maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.0.3 comes with an impressive amount of bugfixes and improvements. Most of them are recorded in the changelog. KDE continues to release updates for the 4.0 desktop on a monthly basis. KDE 4.1, which will bring large improvements to the KDE desktop and application will be released in July this year."

Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0.2. "When KDE 4.0 was officially released in January, there were a lot of gaping holes in basic functionality. During the past few months, the codebase has matured considerably, and the environment is steadily approaching the point where it will be sufficiently robust for widespread day-to-day use. Although there are still many features missing, version 4.0.2 - which was released last week - offers an improved user experience. We tested KDE 4.0.2 with the recently released Kubuntu 8.04 alpha 6." In addition, there is a new 'visual changelog' for KDE 4.1.

"KDE 4.1 will be what everyone expected 4.0 to be - a fully functional revolutionary Linux desktop. I took a look at the revision 777000 of this desktop environment and what you get is a visual changelog describing the current progress in terms of look and feel and the features." It has Bejeweled KDiamond? I'm sold.

"Free/Open Source software has grown considerably from its roots in the UNIX tradition of the command line interface and early X Windows-based graphical environments. As desktop use has increased concurrently with advances in desktop development, serious user interface and experience issues have arisen. Celeste Lyn Paul of User Centered Design, Inc. and the KDE Project presented, 'A Quick and Dirty Intro to User Centered Design in Open Source Development', Saturday at SCaLE 6X. Her talk emphasized the importance of including designers in the development process."

KDE 4.0.1 has been released. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.1. KDE 4.0.1 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and enhanced support for existing and new translations." Here's the changelog.

Another interview with a KDE developer - this time Sebastian Kuegler takes the stage. "So sure, 4.0.0 is not as polished as anyone (especially ourselves) would have wanted it to be. It certainly is a usable desktop, if not up to all the goodness of 3.5.8 (which is what people seem to be used to, which shows that we do deliver quality work). We knew from the beginning that the development cycle leading up to a stable KDE 4 release would be painful. The fact that the definition of stable varies widely within our userbase and the expectations of everyone doesn’t make it any easier." Additionally, the much-criticised KDE 4 panel can now be, among other things, resized.

"With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J. Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software."

The KDE desktop environment is going cross-platform with support for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to porting the core KDE libraries and applications, developers are also porting popular KDE-based software like the Amarok audio player and the KOffice productivity suite.

Ars reviews KDE 4.0.0: "KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series." They were also at the KDE 4.0 release event.

"The long-awaited KDE 4.0.0 was released last week as scheduled. Even though the expectations - following a couple of less than convincing release candidates - weren't very high and the consensus was that the first release of KDE 4 would be more of a 'technology preview' than a usable desktop environment for general deployment, it's hard not to see the enormous amount of good work that has gone into the new code. As Kubuntu's Jonathan Riddell put it, KDE 4 is the start of something amazing and this is possibly the best definition of the current release - it's here, it's available, but it's nowhere near ready for the prime time. It's a decent start, though. Unsurprisingly, the reaction of distributions was a mixed bag. Below is a summary of information about the availability of KDE 4.0.0 in various distributions."

"I think it's really necessary to respond to some criticism seen on the reactions to the latest OSnews article. I won't go into the article itself, imho it's rather negative, but hey. From an user's perspective, it makes sense to only review 3 or 4 parts of KDE 4 and complain about them, and ignore all the other brilliant pieces of work in there, right? On to the responses, I found this reaction by dagw to be the most typical. Well. That's painful. So, is he right? Did we make the wrong decision? Let's look at it from a broader perspective for a while. Let's see it in the Grand Scheme of Things to Come."

KDE 4.0.0 has been released onto the world. "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era." KDE 4.0 is the first release of "KDE 4", but take note that the developers have clearly stated that KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4, but more of a base release with all the underlying systems ready to go, but with still a lot of work to be done on the user-visible side. Download it from the KDE 4.0 info page. Update: Screenshots.

KDE's Aaron Seigo (who owes me a Martini) wrote about a few often-heard misconceptions and questions regarding KDE 4.0, which is supposed to be released January 11th. "Now that 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind me for the moment, I wanted to take a moment to talk really bluntly about 4.0. In particular, I'm going to address some of the common memes in fairly random order that I see about kde 3.5 and 4.0. I'm going to speak bluntly (though not rudely) so prepare yourself."