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What will happen to it? It doesn't run, nor it can be easily ported to WF7. It seems like Elop has simply overlooked Qt's existence.

Qt's main strength was easy C++ code portability between a lot of platforms (Win/Lin/MacOS/even QNX) and even if Nokia implements C# bindings to Qt, you will still have to rewrite all software specifically for WF7.

Meanwhile KDE developers are already very unhappy and concerned about Nokia's decision.

There are several followups on PlanetKDE too. Aaron Seigo (former president of the KDE e.V. board) has made some remarks here.

Yet no one knows what the long term design plans for Plasma are. The users keep getting surprised, and they feel that Plasma over-promised and under-delivered.

On top of that you have Aaron Segio now suggesting that users should have less control over configuration, fewer choices, and saying that end users are dumb. He also has suggested repeatedly lately that if you're not a coder, then you can't comment on UI issues.

Why don't you ask the Plasma developer*s* (i.e. more than just Aaron)? In addition the KDE feature plans are linked to from the front page of the KDE TechBase. For things not covered there you could add Planet KDE to your news reader or subscribe to the panel-devel mailing list. Want to see all commits made just to plasma? Use the KDE commit filter.

As far as Aaron he's been under a constant heap of criticism lately because Plasma in KDE 4 is not *exactly like* kicker+kdesktop in KDE 3 so perhaps you can excuse him for being irritable. Perhaps you have examples that are not taken out of context however, instead of just claiming that he hates users? On that note was there an announcement that KDE made that you felt over-promised what Plasma would do? If that's happened we at KDE need to get that rectified.

Gnome already has a few of those problems (removing choice, treating users like they're dumb)

Have you ever thought that taking the trouble to make a program easier to use doesn't necessarily imply that the user is dumb? I'd respond to your specific comment except that you have mentioned none.

For corporate environments, or people who can't be troubled to configure things, they just want working defaults and simplicity. That isn't a flame, but rather the way things are.

A system that just works and is simple to use? Oh heavens, no! If GNOME has already achieved that (I haven't used it in awhile) then that is something to be congratulated for. Defaults that work are a good idea in general and are separate from features. Adding more checkboxes doesn't make a program more powerful.

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.

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".

There's been a particularly heated exchange going on in the developer's blogs which started with someone describing the new desktop/plasma as "useless crap." Aaron Seigo (the above mentioned core developer) then replies in the comments "i'm tired of this shit".

Now, one of the complaints leveraged was the lack of familiarity a KDE3 user would have with the alien and unfinished Plasma desktop due to a lack of migration path from the familiar kicker/kdesktop/kmenu. After a few more exchanges (which are displayed in all their sordid glory on Planet KDE, Mr. Seigo then announces that he already had some code written to implement a more traditional menu system, but in light of being pissed off by people pointing out some pretty glaring flaws, he will not work on it anymore. Classy.

The whole thing is just childish and immature on both parts and doesn't really fill me with confidence, especially in light of the unfinished and buggy RC.

But again, the only problem with the KDE4 platform so far seems to be Plasma, and it's unfortunate since the project as a whole really seems ready to shake up the Linux desktop. Unfortunately the most visible part of it isn't up to snuff.

YouTube.

Pluto is a planet of the hearts. Why define what constitutes a planet? We know by now that our universe is full of intresting objects which adhere to a solar cult. Pluto was always considered as the mysterious dark planet. And how should we call it now? A belt object?

Will researchers show up and tell us that Gnome, Suse, KDE and Classpath have no planets?

I managed throughout to keep my mouth shut, because some of the distinct hatred of Microsoft was so reminiscent of Ballmer throwing chairs. [...] Is it sheer hatred, or is it totally just idiocy on the part of those guys?

Then after clicking a few links, I found Fernando Magariños, Ramón Morales López, and Mauricio Hernandez.

I'm sure there are countless others...

Planet KDE's site (usually) is http://planetkde.org/

Still, thanks to the KDE & Gnome folks for setting up this humorous surprise.