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KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released
Crobain writes "The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release."
If you read also Aaron Seigo's blog, you'll see that this API change had been expected *way* before KDE 4.0 release. Libplasma is scheduled to go into kdelibs at some point (~ 4.2) so the API must be OK because then it'll be frozen. Besides, Plasma was reaborn from ashes (breakage wise) in just a week. This should tell something.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
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 ;-)
There is always time taken in loading the supporting libraries, which really only affects the starting time of the first app that uses them. For subsequent apps that also use them, they're already loaded. Have you ever tried to start gedit while running a KDE desktop? It might give a similar result.