KDE 4 roadmap

I found this interesting post on Planet KDE. It seems KDE will do minor monthly releases and every 6 months they will do a new major release. KDE 4.1 is scheduled for July, KDE 4.2 for January 2009 and so on. Now, I don't know if that's official or not, but if it is, I think Mark Shuttleworth will be pleased since that's more or less exactly what he has requested :) I personally hope it's official as I like these time based releases, I think they have worked well for various other projects.

KDE 4.0 released!

It's out! Huge congrats and thanks to all people that have been part of creating KDE 4!

I played around with a live cd last night and it certainly is promising. It is important to remember that the goals of this release wasn't to create a desktop that rivals KDE 3.5.x. KDE 4.0 is the foundation. All the big changes are "under the hood". For many people, it will be better to stick with KDE 3.5.x until at least KDE 4.1 is released.

KDE4 design decisions

There's been some discussions recently about KDE4, especially about Plasma. This post by Liquidat explains some of the design decisions made with KDE4. It's a good read if you are interested in KDE4 and it should clear up some of the misunderstandings.

Aaron Seigo on free vs proprietary software

Aaron Seigo, a prominent KDE hacker was recently interviewed about the difference between free software and proprietary software. He comments on the interview himself here. Open standards are very important in my opinion and Aaron Seigo have some really good insight into the problems you are likely to experience when using proprietary standards. You can see the interview in the link to his blog above.

Powermanagement in Linux

Here I am, running Kubuntu on my Thinkpad laptop and it works pretty well. One thing I'm not too impressed with though is powermanagement but I did know it was being worked and the latest kernel had some improvements in that regard. It seems this is a focus area for the next release of Ubuntu and the improvements in the kernel is certainly helping:

Tickless kernel. The new dynticks and hi-res timers make a *huge* difference. Ben Collins mentioned 30 - 40 minutes of extra battery life with dynticks and hi-res timers enabled. This stuff is new in 2.6.21, and already in the Gutsy kernel. dynticks also make it possible for the CPU to sleep much more. Another thing that's important in that respect is HPET, basically doing something similar, but less effective. Every bit helps, however.

Read the rest of Sebastian Küglers post.

Oh...I almost forgot, but I want to repeat what is said in that post: Avoid ATI (now AMD) graphics cards/chips - their support for Linux sucks bigtime! It seems they simply just don't care. Vote with your wallet guys - buy Intel, they provide proper open source drivers!

More KDE 4: Part 1/4 about Decibel

Is there some kind of competition going on about writing about KDE 4? Recently lots of KDE 4 related articles have been published on "The Dot" and elsewhere. I'm not complaining though, I love reading about it and I'm really looking forward to KDE 4. The latest article is about Decibel:

People use their computers to communicate with others. Usually, they want to communicate as close to real-time as possible. Email, instant messaging, and Voice over IP (VoIP), are some of the different ways people communicate using their computers. Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses. Ironically, each of these means of communication do not talk very well with other means of communication.

This is where Decibel comes in. Decibel is a service, not an application. The goal of Decibel is to create a bridge between different communication technologies. Decibel will make it easy to integrate real-time communication technologies into applications, Tobias says. Decibel provides a central storage place for settings of real-time communications. This will allow one communication application (say, email) to talk to another communication application (say, instant messaging) without having to learn a new language.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this series for sure :)

KDE 4: Sonnet library

Here is another interesting article about a part of what will eventually become KDE 4. This is about the Sonnet library which I haven't really read about before, but seems to be yet another very nice improvement of KDE and yet another thing which I haven't really seen anywhere else, at least not as nicely integrated as this:

Because Sonnet is a library accessible to all KDE applications, Rideout foresees applications beyond text editing programs. Its language detection feature is particularly ripe for unexpected usage. Sonnet is capable of determining the language a text is written in given about 20 characters of data. This feature already works for several dozen languages. According to Rideout, the Strigi desktop search developers are considering integrating language detection into their application's search features. Perhaps users will, one day, be able to search for "documents written in Spanish within the past week."

Rideout, who recently earned his bachelor's degree in linguistics, says that improved multilingual support is the "most requested change" from KDE 3 and it is here where language detection has the most potential. He says, "Users will be able to have documents checked for correctness in a fine-grained manner. Any separate section of a document (by default, this means a paragraph) will be checked in its respective language by the tools available for that language. For convenience, each section will have its language detected automatically, with the option of a user disabling or overriding the detection."

That is something which have bothered me a bit for quite a while - I write in both danish and english, having a system that automatically figures out what language I'm using would be pretty neat. That this will work and be integrated into the entire desktop is quite nice and I think this is where KDE compares positively with the competition and have done so for quite a few years.

The Road to KDE 4

Troy Unrau has been writing a great series of articles about the next major release of the open source desktop, KDE. The series is called "The Road to KDE" and the latest one is Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier. Phonon should make multimedia work better and more reliable.

Here is a listing of the previous articles (first one at the bottom) which I highly recommend:

Kalzium and KmPlot
Job Progress Reimagined
Full Mac OS X Support
New KOffice Technologies
SVG Rendering in Applications