KDE Archive

"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."

Some interesting tidbits concerning KDE 4. Firstly, there is a debate whether to close all bugs of KDE 3.x (or not) once 4.0 has been released; you can vote on a poll posing this question too. Secondly, some unscientific benchmarks show that KDE 4.0 from svn is less resource hungry than current KDE 3.x builds. Update: KDE 4.0 RC2 has been released.

The newest version of KDE Four Live, an openSUSE-based Live CD for testing KDE 4, was released three days ago, just nine days after the initial version that included Release Candidate 1 was released. KDE/openSUSE dev Stephan Binner announced the release on his blog, celebrating the strong public interest in the initial RC1-based Live CD - over 10000 downloads achieved in the first few days. Meanwhile, although mainstream reviews of RC1 are still scarce, Binner's blog announcement of the previous version contained this interesting tidbit: "It looks like whatever will be released or presented at the event which was fixed by the sponsor to happen in January will be only used by very early adopters. Hopefully openSUSE 11.0 will be able to ship some KDE 4.1.x release or some very high KDE 4.0.x release (which saw some light features freeze lift)," he wrote. Readers are welcome to download the newest Live CD (Torrent) and test it for themselves. A Debian LiveCD is also available, but it still includes KDE4 Beta4 and not RC1.

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!

"The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. As KDE has largely has been in bugfix mode, this latest Beta aims to encourage testers to have a look at it to help us find and solve the remaining problems and bugs. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell. Sebastian Kugler notes: 'The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle.'"