KDE Official News

KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system.

"This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world."

The 500,000th commit took place on January 19th, 2006, and the 750,000th commit 23 months later on December 18th, 2007. In contrast, only nineteen more months were required to reach the 1,000,000 commit milestone.

Akademy 2009 was held as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last week. During the week the KDE community attended conference presentations and was engaged in meetings, informal discussions and of course a great deal of coding. This article provides an overview of what's happening in the KDE universe and what can be expected for the future.

The KDE development platform gains support by Maemo's announcement to include Qt as supported platform in its next release. The semantic desktop gained traction with wider adoption of its underlying infrastructure. The Plasma team showed their upcoming netbook interface; a first version is expected to be available in the first quarter of next year. Cornelius Schumacher reports that KDE e.V., the organization behind KDE, is healthily growing and new projects to grow KDE's developer base and industry adoption are being spawned. A shift to next generation code hosting using the version control system git and its web interface Gitorious was announced, creating a way for more people to contribute to KDE in the future.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

The KDE Team has released another release candidate for KDE called "Canteras". It contains only few changes compared to RC1 which suggests that the 4.3 is stabilizing and shaping up well for the 4.3.0 release on 28th of July. KDE 4.3.0 will be followed up by a series of monthly bugfix and translation updates. Testers are asked to report bugs in this release so 4.3.0 becomes a release as smooth as possible.

KDE's Release Team has already opened KDE SVN's trunk for development to allow for new features to be developed during the currently ongoing Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Fixes will be backported to the KDE 4.3 branch to stabilize the desktop further. After KDE 4.3, the next release, KDE 4.4 will be released in January 2010.

KDE e.V.'s Annual General Meeting was held today during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The KDE e.V. is the association that provides representation, support and governance to the KDE community. After former board member Klaas Freitag and KDE e.V. president Aaron Seigo stepped down and vice president Adriaan de Groot's term ended, three open positions had to be filled. Adriaan de Groot was re-elected as vice president of KDE e.V. and two new board members have been elected.

Celeste Lyn Paul, the leader of KDE's usability efforts, and Frank Karlitschek, the man behind KDE community web services such as KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org. Karlitschek is also known for his efforts to introduce the Social Desktop to KDE. The new president of the KDE e.V. is Cornelius Schumacher, and Frank takes over the role of vice president and treasurer from Cornelius.

Today, three days before the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit starts, the KDE team released KDE 4.3.0 RC1. RC1 is an early candidate for what will become KDE 4.3.0 at the end of this month.
Artwork has now also been merged, and KDE 4.3 will have a new Plasma look, sported by the new, light "Air" Plasma theme. Oxygen, the default in earlier versions of KDE 4 is still available as an option through the "Desktop Settings" dialog. Please give this version some good testing so we can iron out last bugs and make 4.3.0 a smooth release. Note that KDE 4.3.0 RC1 is not suitable for end users.

The KDE release train continues to roll, delivering another beta release of KDE 4.3 to you today. The effort has shifted towards increasing stability and adding polish to the codebase so our users will find a well-working KDE 4.3.0 on their desktops when it is released in late July.

The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia's Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

The KDE Release Machine seems unstoppable these days! Today brings you KDE 4.2.4, the monthly update to the 4.2 series of KDE. KDE 4.2.4 is the recommended update for all those using KDE 4.2, or rather anything in the KDE 4 series. Those that stayed away from KDE 4 until now might give it a whirl as well to see if KDE 4 is up to their tasks.

The first beta version of the new and shiny KDE 4.3 has been released. The list of new features and improvements is long and impressive as ever. There is a new tree view mode in System Settings, many cool new features, the desktop search becomes more visible to the user, and yet more polishing in user interfaces all over the place make using KDE more fun.

In our tradition of doing monthly service releases, today the KDE community presents the release of 4.2.3, the third update to the KDE 4.2 series and just as cool as ever. This service update brings you bugfixes, performance improvements and updated translations, but no new features in order to minimize the risk of regressions. KDE 4.2.3 is a recommended upgrade for everybody currently running KDE 4.2.2 or earlier.