Newsforge: KDE 4 Promises Radical Changes to the Free Desktop

Tom Chance discusses the developments happening in KDE 4 on Newsforge. He looks at the Appeal group which brings artists and usability experts together with developers at the earliest stages of development, the context linking platform Tenor and the ideas coming together for the KDE 4 desktop Plasma. He also looks at RuDI, a library which would help ISVs integrate with KDE. "All of these innovations, if completed, will make KDE an even better desktop environment. When next year's aKademy rolls around, it will be interesting to see what kind of progress has been made."

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by Nicolas (not verified)

On a page on gnome wiki I found some great ideas for the next version of gnome that could be implemented in kde too. The page (http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero) is more focused on new functionaly in the desktop than the GUI.

I found this really interesting:

"Application Structure: Applications in it current form scatter all over the system when being installed. Stuff gets in /bin, /sbin, /usr/share and wherever. When looking at an application as a single object, apps should be in a single file (much like an rpm, except that the files won't be distributed across the system). Applications can indicate what they are capable of in a capabilities.xml or something like that so that the system can index which apps can do what. This will also make it very simple to deactivate a app without deinstalling it. When apps are a single (archive) file, they can very easily be distributed, installed (simply put it in the apps dir using the "Application Manager"), deactivated (click on "deactivate" in the "Application Manager") of removed (you get the idea). Another good point on this is that this makes security much easier, you can simply allow or disallow rights to apps based on their codebase since all bins of an app are in or under 1 dir/archife. Image how easy it would be to limit bandwith to apps, to allow/deny internet access, to allow/deny users to use the app."

Today installing or removing an application is a headache. This will simplify things. I think Mac has a similar approach on his desktop.