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.

Beryl - 3D effects on a Linux desktop

Here is a nice video of aiglx + Beryl which gives some nice 3D effects or "bling" as some like to call it:

The next release of Ubuntu should include Beryl. It will be interesting to see how they integrate it. I don't know whether it will be available for Kubuntu (which I use), but I hope it will :)

The harder part (I think) will be to find some good uses of this cool new technology. 3D effects are nice and having a nice looking desktop is certainly not a bad thing, but it is also important to keep it usable. In what was can we use it to create a more userfriendly desktop?

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