KDE 4 begins

This post is somewhat delayed (given that I wasn't around much last week) but KDE 4 has now been released. The internet is now full of reviews and blog posts about this highly significant milestone in the development of KDE and free software generally. The KDE news post can be found here, and there are articles here, here and here. If you have a spare hour, I also highly recommend watching the release event's keynote speech, delivered by Aaron Seigo, President of KDE e.V, the non-profit organisation which represents the KDE project legally and financially. The video, available here, contains lots of nice demos of the new functionality, and also introduces the new frameworks (or pillars) upon which KDE 4 is built. It also shows early demos of KDE running natively on Windows and OSX, as platform independence was always one of the goals of KDE 4. This is a little contravertial, but also quite exciting as it has the potential to bring in many more users (and testers and developers).

I myself have installed the KDE 4.0.0 packages, available with Kubuntu Gutsy (see here), though haven't had much time to look at it yet. Hence I'm going to refrain from any real judgement or review until a later date. I will say, however, that despite a few of my concerns around Dolphin and the general move to dumb down much of the user interface, it does look very nice indeed, and I like the sound of where the project is heading. It's good to see a piece (suite?) of software which I use so much having so much effort and momentum behind its development. Personally, I'm going to be very interested to see the new Akonadi (named apparently after the Greek god of Knowledge) personal information management framework come into play in forthcoming releases.

As all the release statements and blogs say, KDE 4.0.0 is merely the beginning of KDE 4. The frameworks are now laid out and finalised, the applications are coming together. It is in no way yet suitable as a replacement for KDE 3.5, simply because the applications are not there yet (such as Kontact), but with a little time, I am certain that this will become an excellent leading edge desktop system.