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We're in feature freeze, so that means bugfixing.

If you can code: go to bugzilla (http://bugs.kde.org) find a bug, write a patch, send it to the appropriate mailing list.

If you can't code: watch http://dot.kde.org/ for the next BugSquad BugDay (oh look, Kopete is having one *right now*!) (they are usually Sundays, every two weeks or so) and come learn bug triage. It's pretty easy, and can save developers hours upon hours of work.

Or: write documentation #kde-docs ;)
join the artists, join usability, etc etc

There's a lot out there. If nothing else, you can at least file a bug report for your next crash:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports

We're in feature freeze, so that means bugfixing.

If you can code: go to bugzilla (http://bugs.kde.org) find a bug, write a patch, send it to the appropriate mailing list.

If you can't code: watch http://dot.kde.org/ for the next BugSquad BugDay (oh look, Kopete is having one *right now*!) (they are usually Sundays, every two weeks or so) and come learn bug triage. It's pretty easy, and can save developers hours upon hours of work.

Or: write documentation #kde-docs ;)
join the artists, join usability, etc etc

There's a lot out there. If nothing else, you can at least file a bug report for your next crash:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports

Why listen to a "pundit" when you can go to the source where the issues are dealt with. Yes, eventually you get to something useful like this to sort the FUD out. Basically, KDE 4.0 is not "ready". Though it is more flexible and has all of the old features and more, not all of those features have been exposed yet. This is not a big deal because reasonable distributions still ship with the still excellent KDE 3.5 applications. Bruce needs to do more research before he spouts off like that.

Why listen to a "pundit" when you can go to the source where the issues are dealt with. Yes, eventually you get to something useful like this to sort the FUD out. Basically, KDE 4.0 is not "ready". Though it is more flexible and has all of the old features and more, not all of those features have been exposed yet. This is not a big deal because reasonable distributions still ship with the still excellent KDE 3.5 applications. Bruce needs to do more research before he spouts off like that.

I've written enough software to realise that an x.0 release comes with new technology that will contain some regressions, but it's really a bad sign when the x.0 is announced as "this is really just a preview" and then the x.1 still isn't meant to be mature.

Well I suppose this is better than when people were saying that KDE claimed that 4.0 would solve world hunger but KDE did not claim that 4.0 was really just a preview: The KDE 4.0 Announcement, although I do believe that at some point KDE released a KDE 4 tech preview.

I'm sure that posters on Planet KDE tried to warn people not to get *too* excited about KDE 4 but that would have been true of any n+1.0 release I think.

In retrospect I suppose the KDE Marketing Group could have done a better job at expressing clearly about where KDE 4.0 was going to differ from KDE 3.5 though, which probably would have stopped a lot of the confusion early.

As far as KDE 4.1 I'm obviously biased but it's mature enough for me, it feels worlds better than 4.0 (even 4.0.4). There's still KDE 3.5 features I miss and I need to get JuK to crash less still =D. But I never have time... :-/. Either way I would not claim that 4.1 is immature by any means at least.

Why?

Aren't you aware of the Linux development paradigm that has been the rule since Linus released Linux? ... "Release Early, release often!" FOSS depends upon the users helping in the development of software, not whining about perceived or real problems.

Bruce Byfield summarized his findings with the following statement:
How stable KDE 4.1 will be when released at the end of this month is anybody's guess. But, judging from its features, the release will be a major milestone in the 4.x series. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly not be the complete answer to user discontent that has been promised. It might even drive large number of users away from KDE altogether.

Such a reaction would be misguided. KDE 4.x has many features, including the use of scalable vector graphics and natural language searches that make it the most innovative free desktop currently in development. Moreover, if you dislike some of its experiments, you can work around them with no more trouble than it takes to change your desktop wallpaper -- for instance, one of the widgets you can add to the desktop is a KDE 3.5.x menu.

That is wise advice.

Troy Unrau introduced KDE4, before the first beta was released, on Jan 1, 2007 with the "Road to KDE4" series at http://dot.kde.org/1167723426

Before he resigned KDE4 to focus on his Masters in Geology degree, Troy posted the following comments:

We knew there would be some pushback to the major changes in KDE 4.0, because, believe it or not, history is simply repeating itself. KDE 2.0 was met almost exactly the same way, although open source was flying a lot lower under the public radar in those days. It took until KDE 2.2 before distros mostly stopped shipping KDE 1.1.2 and were happy with 2.x.ferent standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.

So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!

The hysteria in some complaints (and deliberate FUDing and astroturfing in others) is misplaced. FOSS software is not static, especially when there is a vibrant body of users CONTRIBUTING to its development (coding, testing, documenting or donations). Users who do not contribute but only complain are "poisonous users". A project grows when it has an amply supply of contributing users. Any project dies when its users are poisonous.

It is also obvious that some "complainers" are not KDE users at all. Their motives are obvious. A lot of this brouhaha has been exploited by a few bloggers trying to increase their page hits by inflammatory comments with little basis in fact.

In which case you should be looking at the KDE install for windows, sorry it's via an easy-as-falling-over installer too.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation

Kwrite IIRC is part of the default installation - it's on my Vista install (I'm not rebooting to check).

More info at http://windows.kde.org/ too.

HTH

In which case you should be looking at the KDE install for windows, sorry it's via an easy-as-falling-over installer too.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation

Kwrite IIRC is part of the default installation - it's on my Vista install (I'm not rebooting to check).

More info at http://windows.kde.org/ too.

HTH

Indeed, I was hoping they would be a little more quick with it, but I think you are right in saying "long term plan" was about right, although I imagine that if its anything like Slashdot (et al) that trying to find people to blaspheme and create Windows stuff is a problem.

Although, im not sure where the 20MB's came from now anyways (I responded before even looking).. but after looking the installer is only 1.6MB ... which isnt too bad, seeing how many languages it supports, and the fact it may even come with 2 different compilers aswell...

http://akregator.kde.org/download.php

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

iTunes != Unix. Are you saying that because iTunes runs on Windows OS X is not Unix?

even something like KDE sticks to more of the core tenants of unix than Mac os X.

Mind telling that to the KDE developers who ported KDE to OS X? Or Gnome? How can X11 apps be configured for Gnome?

Simply, as I said in my post you replied to I can install many Linux programs, I wont say all because I don't know if there are any that can't be installed, on my Mac. Just as Linux users can use Debian packagers apt-get and dpkg to install .deb software on Linux, I can use Fink to install those programs on my Mac. I can also install software using Redhat's RPM package manager on it using MacPorts.

I guess you're not aware of the agreement between Trolltech and KDE.

Another post mentioned it, but it bears repeating.

KDE Free Qt Foundation

Essentially, to protect KDE from Qt becoming closed-source, Qt must release at least 1 new version of Qt with an open-source license once a year (AFAIK - can't remember the exact details, but this sounds about right) or KDE is free to release Qt in BSD-form.

Also, Qt has already been GPL'ed (version 2 & 3), so if it was ever closed off (even though that would be a bad strategic move on Nokia's part since they then lose their revenue-stream - commercial projects can begin to use Qt without licensing it from Trolltech), you could always fork it.

Here it is: the KDE Free Qt Foundation.

If Nokia screws up and stops releasing FOSS versions of Qt or otherwise messes with it, Qt's forcefully taken from them. The Foundation is there to ensure that Qt remains available. In a lot of ways, it would make more sense to do this now before Nokia starts using it as a hammer to pound DRM where it doesn't belong. Further, Nokia's competitors would be stupid to use it while Nokia controls it. Tools like Qt belong under an independent company or foundation. Jaaksi is just making that very clear.

What Jaaksi seems to be saying on behalf of his employer, Nokia, is that the company is unwilling to abide by the license (the GPL) under which their new business model is founded upon. That's not a way to appear clever. Though it's good of them to put the cards on the table so early after acquisition, it's still rather shameful of Nokia to try to bullshit us like that. Probably time to check the resume's of Nokia execs and dismiss any moles from Redmond.

I'm not planning on giving up on Qt anytime soon, but I do resent the increased level of alertness required by these probes.

Here you go.

Google knows all. KDE Free Qt Foundation

I hadn't heard of it before, either. Now I'm wondering: what additional power does this agreement give them? Presumably everyone already has the right to fork Qt.

If Nokia stops publishing Qt under the GPL, the last GPL'd version automatically gets a nice BSD license slapped on it: http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

If they wanted to show off Linux applications that don't have Windows ports they might have chosen maybe "KOffice", or "Gnumeric", or "Evolution". I dunno.

Gnumeric runs fine on Windows. It is MUCH better than Open Office's spreadsheet. Evolution on Windows is HORRIBLE, though. There is an alpha quality version of KOffice for Windows.

Sorry but that's bull. I read the kde dev blogs, I use KDE 4.1 packages, and I love KDE, but the release was certainly not advertised as unstable nearly enough.

Have a look at the official release announcement. Not a word that it's not actually meant for users. http://kde.org/announcements/4.0/

I love KDE, but that release was a bad move. Luckily KDE 4.1 will actually be pretty good for users, so it won't be repeated.

Go check out http://windows.kde.org/

They do?

Im not sure which distro's you use, but so far every distro I use has a choice between KDE or Gnome (of which i choose the former) aswell as the usual other more lean ones.

There are some distro's that frown upon Gnome aswell (Slackware for example, which happens to be my favorite)

Distro's that come with KDE (not a complete list)
http://www.kde.org/download/distributions.php

Distro's that come with Gnome (Probably not complete)
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/footware.shtml

Desktop icons were deprecated in favor of a folder view applet, that you can have on your desktop, so you can still have desktop icons on your desktop via the applet.

From Aaron Seigo's blog:

"Hey!" I hear you say, "I see icons on that desktop!" That's quite right. (And, I must say, you are quite observant today. ;) So what was a mumbling about earlier then when I said the icons were gone?

Well, we now have a folder view applet courtesy of Frederik Höglund. It can view any folder you want, including the desktop folder. You can also set a filter, making it possible to, for instance, view just images or whatever. It uses KIO so you can view remote folders as well. You can drag items to and from it, delete files, scroll, etc. It lines everything up in a nice grid and uses the same drawing routines that Dolphin, Konqueror, KRunner and others use from kdelibs for the icons.

As you can see they didn't get rid of desktop icons, they made having desktop icons BETTER.

Image of icons on the desktop via the applet Original Blog Post

I'm not advocating to donate less to KDE, but apart from the page you mentioned, KDE gets corporate support (as already mentioned) and has several patrons.
Also, IIRC, KDE is very closely related to SuSE which then again belongs to Novell now. With that kind of background support, they don't seem to be struggling to pay their bandwidth bills, so I tend to stick to smaller projects without corporate backing. I find my money to make more of a difference than it'd make to KDE, Gnome, OpenSuSE or Fedora (and so on).

I'm not advocating to donate less to KDE, but apart from the page you mentioned, KDE gets corporate support (as already mentioned) and has several patrons.
Also, IIRC, KDE is very closely related to SuSE which then again belongs to Novell now. With that kind of background support, they don't seem to be struggling to pay their bandwidth bills, so I tend to stick to smaller projects without corporate backing. I find my money to make more of a difference than it'd make to KDE, Gnome, OpenSuSE or Fedora (and so on).

Unless I'm doing the sums wrong they get 60,000 euros per annum from their patrons & supporters alone:
http://ev.kde.org/supporting-members.php
(not that this is a reason not to donate more).

The rest of their donations seem to be listed here.
Mostly Hosting / hardware and employing devs, some cash though.

The common thinking would be, why should I donate to a big project, they must have been getting billions already
The truth is different guys, just from looking at the donations page at KDE.org I would have thought that that they get at-least 30K$ p/m, but the truth is different (300$, in a good month)
We, the USERS, should donate more

On iliad you can annotate, but the method ain't perfect. See the end of this article [arstechnica.com] for a review.

Amarok on Windows
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-builds-on-Windows.html

Amarok supports iPods
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod#Supported_Devices

I believe by repeated system restarts he was referring to the issue with XP SP3 on certain AMD machines in which after installing SP3 the computer doesn't ever finish booting before restarting itself.

Patching the Linux Kernel without restarting
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/24/1334234.shtml

How does recompiling VMware equate to repeated system restarts?

Google much?

Amarok on Windows
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-builds-on-Windows.html

Amarok supports iPods
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod#Supported_Devices

I believe by repeated system restarts he was referring to the issue with XP SP3 on certain AMD machines in which after installing SP3 the computer doesn't ever finish booting before restarting itself.

Patching the Linux Kernel without restarting
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/24/1334234.shtml

How does recompiling VMware equate to repeated system restarts?

Google much?

well, it's here in an alpha version already:
http://windows.kde.org/news.php#itemFirstKOfficeAlphaReleaseonWindows

Actually, Amarok is already working in Windows. While it's not ready for general use, information on the tech preview can be found at http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/583-Windows-Binaries-of-Amarok-2-Tech-Preview.html Also, I and I'm sure many others have had iPods working with Amarok just fine for years, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

Currently, no. Will there be? yes. Remember kids, a little research goes a long way...

Either I didn't get your trying to trick others, or you got tricked yourself... but check the date of the announce.

KDE 4 stream, there is a windows port in progress. Next major release of Amarok will be KDE 4 based, Amarok will run on windows. oh, well, here was an early trial from last December:

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/536-Amarok-2-now-with-100-more-audio-playing-on-Windows.html

And my amarok works with my wife's Ipod-touch under Debian Lenny, just fine, thanks. The thing that doesn't is the ITunes store, but she just uses the Ipod with wireless, and Amarok backs it up for her. It works great.

'What if you're a windows person?' -- You must be new here. It is slashdot policy that such persons be referred to as 'unwashed masses', or if you prefer 'Joe six-pack'. Such persons are axiomatically defined as never posting on slashdot. You sir, are a typing contradiction.

"For Linux, Agreed. But when is Amarok going to work in Windows or with people's iPods? Oh. Never ??"

Never say never.
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-builds-on-Windows.html

Amarok will be working on Windows soon, and since when does Amarok not support iPods?

I use the GTK Theme Selector and themes from http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/ to theme Pidgin.

For IM use under KDE, you might want to try Kopete instead of Pidgin. Here is their website: http://kopete.kde.org/. It will probably entail less hoop-jumping to theme, etc than a Gnome app running under KDE.

Soon there will also be Linux and OSX ports of Digsby if you are into the social networking aspect of the internet. It also supports the MSN protocol.

For the really adventurous, I am sure you can port MirandaIM over to Linux. The client and source are GPL and are freely available. I think someone from Russia has already done this: http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?t=4624&highlight=Miranda+IM+Linux

Hello - as the maintainer of Konsole I'll explain what is going on. I'll address specific points first:

> The buttons for quickly closing/opening a tab are gone.

Konsole in KDE 4.0 is orientated more around keyboard shortcuts - which I think makes sense in a terminal. (Ctrl+Shift+N creates a new tab, Ctrl+Shift+W closes the current one, although I would recommend using the normal Ctrl+D combination to exit the shell)

Enough people complained (via bugs.kde.org) that I added the 'New Tab' button back in as an option in KDE 4.1. Plus there are Firefox-esqueue close buttons on tabs and support for re-arranging tabs by drag and drop or moving tabs between windows.

> The ability to send input to all tabs is completely gone

It didn't work at the time of the 4.0 release so it got cut. It has been reimplemented in KDE 4.1 with more flexibility in response to various RFE bug reports:

http://commit-digest.org/issues/2008-04-13/files/konsole-copy-input-to.png

It is not the case the Konsole in KDE 4.0 has 'less features' in total. The menus may look far emptier but there is actually not very much missing. In fact it has quite a few additions, mostly fulfilling a large backlog of feature requests in bugs.kde.org, which I think are very useful:

* The terminal setup UI was replaced with one which is simpler but also more flexible
* Split-view mode
* Incremental search
* Key binding editor
* Improved performance, especially scrolling in large windows

In any case, if you have a complaint then please report it at http://bugs.kde.org/ - I am much more likely to read about it there than on Slashdot. Plus it also allows users to vote on the issues most important to them which is helpful from my perspective trying to allocate the limited spare time I have.

Finally, as someone who followed KDE development discussion quite closely over the last two years, it is inaccurate to say that KDE is attempting to "copy" Windows Vista or is in some large measure "inspired" by it. The menu for example was originally developed by OpenSuSE for KDE 3 - a long time before Vista was released, based on openSuSE's own research. Evidence of this can be found in some notably different design decisions compared with Vista's menu. For example, both the Gnome SLED menu and KDE's "Kickoff" have a search facility but it is located at the top of the menu rather than the button because users couldn't find it when it was placed at the bottom.

I think the view that KDE is trying to "clone" Windows, if not trolling, boils down to the use of black on the bar at the bottom of the screen. I am not involved with that part of KDE but I understand that the look of it is quite likely to change somewhat for KDE 4.1.

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152030

Warning: lots of developer whining in that bug.

Basically, the Oxygen artists insisted that having the default window decoration obey the user's color settings for the window frame (which solve the problem of active/inactive distinction) was just too ugly to bear. Never mind that the first question everybody else had when looking at a KDE4 desktop was "how do I tell which window is on top?" The first response was "you're supposed to have composite support, then the shadows will tell you." That didn't go over too well. They also claimed they were working on a bunch of alternate ways to show the focus, and that supporting colored title bars in the meantime was completely unacceptable.

Eventually, the KWin maintainer stepped in and said they didn't have a choice, and that the default window decoration had to conform to certain expectations. There was a bunch more whining, however, so finally he just forked the "Ozone" decoration where the only difference is that window frame color works (but you still have the option to do it the blended way).

Anyway, long story short, having active/inactive window frame colors is supposed to be the default in 4.1.

Shameless plug on the Plasma FAQ (which I, among others, work on):

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/FAQ

The first three questions should answer at least part of your doubts.

I really hope kde-pim will make it into this release, as the kde3 version gives me grief when using IMAP, however this looks far from certain...

That's not true my friend, I think you misunderstood the 4.1 Release Schedule. We're in soft feature freeze, but planned features can still be added to the code until May 19th ;-)

I was going to suggest the same thing. The KDE Education Project. They have some interesting stuff there (working and in the works).

Also consider Step, which from the description of phun sounds similar to that program.

Step is part of the KDE Edutainment module (or rather, it will be soon...)

Also consider Step, which from the description of phun sounds similar to that program.

Step is part of the KDE Edutainment module (or rather, it will be soon...)

The KDE Education package contains some impressive applications. The KDE Games package contains some nice casual games. In KDE4, many of them were given new good-looking SVG graphics. Also since KDE4, they can be run on Windows and Mac OS X natively (and on Linux too of course). The Windows port is a work in progress; maybe not something you should install tomorrow, but something to keep an eye on.

The KDE Education package contains some impressive applications. The KDE Games package contains some nice casual games. In KDE4, many of them were given new good-looking SVG graphics. Also since KDE4, they can be run on Windows and Mac OS X natively (and on Linux too of course). The Windows port is a work in progress; maybe not something you should install tomorrow, but something to keep an eye on.