The Start of Something Amazing with KDE 4.0 Release

Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

The KDE 4.0 desktop

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas.
The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all
KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with
(removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell
offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop
as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced
graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through
vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface
enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it.
Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new filemanager are only two
applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop.
Nearly all user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a
facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

Distributions known to have packages:

  • An alpha version of KDE4-based Arklinux 2008.1 is expected
    shortly after this release, with an expected final release within 3 or 4 weeks.
  • Debian KDE 4.0 packages are available in the experimental branch.
    The KDE Development Platform will even make it into Lenny. Watch for
    announcements by the Debian KDE Team.
  • Fedora will feature KDE 4.0 in Fedora 9, to be released
    in April, with Alpha releases being available from
    24th of January. KDE 4.0 packages are in the pre-alpha Rawhide repository.
  • Gentoo Linux provides KDE 4.0 builds on
    http://kde.gentoo.org.
  • Kubuntu packages are included in the upcoming "Hardy Heron"
    (8.04) and also made available as updates for the stable "Gutsy Gibbon" (7.10).
    A Live CD is available for trying out KDE 4.0.
    More details can be found in the
    announcement on kubuntu.org
    .
  • Mandriva will provide packages for
    2008.0 and aims
    at producing a Live CD with the latest snapshot of 2008.1.
  • openSUSE packages are available
    for
    openSUSE 10.3 (
    one-click
    install
    ),
    openSUSE Factory (
    one-click
    install
    )
    and openSUSE 10.2. A KDE
    Four Live CD
    with these packages is also available. KDE 4.0 will be part of the upcoming
    openSUSE 11.0 release.
  • openSUSE based KDE Four Live CD

Thanks to the coders, artists, usability experts, testers, bug triagers and many more who have made this release the start of something amazing. Tell us what you think on this
4.0 feedback page.

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Comments

by Bille (not verified)

I've just fixed this at http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/KDE4 .

by Koko (not verified)

thx!

by m. (not verified)

Big thanks to all involved and congratulation to users :)

by kdeuser (not verified)

Congratulations! Thank you for your great work.

by Joergen Ramskov (not verified)

Thanks a lot for all the hard work that all the KDE people have done to make KDE4 a reality!

Congrats on a major archievement!

I look forward to trying it out later today.

by yman (not verified)

Just wondering whether or not this excellent service will continue.

by SSJ (not verified)

Hopefully this is answered on the homepage:

http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html

but in a nutshell: With the release of 4.0.0, and in light of the existence of OpenSUSE's build service which can satisfy people's curiosity about KDE on the run up to 4.1, the KDE4Daily will not receive any more updates.

I intend to post a quick "KDE4Daily post-mortem" to the KDE developer lists to see if they think it has been of benefit to KDE (there have been a handful of "false" bug reports arising from KDE4Daily) and to ask whether they would like to see it return in the run up to 4.1.0. I'll post the outcome on the homepage in due course.

I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who helped out with the project and, repeating what I said in the notes for the final KDE4Daily revision, making my first contribution to KDE so pleasant :)

Congrats to the devs on the 4.0.0 release!

by yman (not verified)

then all I could say is this:
AAARRRRRR!

by Mark (not verified)

Would be great if this continued, I am not going to install KDE4.0 because I do not consider I usable in a productive environment, but I would like keep tracking the progress (hoping that KDE 4.1 or 4.2 on day be ok)

by Erwin Boskma (not verified)

Congratulations to the entire KDE team with the release of KDE 4! I've been trying it since Beta1 and it looks and works great. Keep up the good work!

by Gerwin (not verified)

They said it couldn't be done .... Congratz guys! Feels very snappy here!
Thanks all your volunteers for making this possible....

by Gian (not verified)

Thanks for your hard work, it will pay off! KDE rocks!!

by Sweeny Lover Of... (not verified)

My eyes are having orgasms just looking at these screenshots! Thank you KDE developers, you are all amazing!

by Bobby (not verified)

They will have continuous orgasms if you would install the real thing ;)

by Chani (not verified)

and your ears, too ;)

by Johanne (not verified)

Um...

Those would be eargasms.
(sometimes the result of aural secks)

sorry.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

I'd like to join the other posters in saying "Congratulations" for the release of KDE 4.0! It is a great day for Free Software.

by vincenzo (not verified)

Thanks so much!!!

by Mihail Mezyakov (not verified)

KDE is true! I like it :D

by Swaroop Shankar (not verified)

Thank you for this sweet release. Sure KDE4 is going to be a great success. I am currently downloading and installing it on my opensuse 10.3 machine. THANKS once again. Great going KDE team

by Luk` (not verified)
by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

many of the things on that list got done, including: okular superceding many of the smaller unmaintained apps in its area of expertise; kedit going away and kate going to kdesdk; the games project did an awesome job here going through every single app very effectively; kpersonalizer is gone; kcontrol replaced; rss is now handled by libsyndicate (though kdepim apps still aren't all ported to it afaik); ksysguard moved into the right places (including being made into a library); krdc has been revamped ... etc. there are some things that didn't get addressed, particularly in areas where the turbulence has been in lower levels (e.g. multimedia with phonon, kdepim with akonadi) .. but we hit a significant number of those goals on that page, which is pretty impressive given that some of that stuff was written by people who may not actually be active contributors to the project ;)

by Wow (not verified)

Look at kde-apps, there's a KDE 4 KPlayer, just released!

/me dances and hugs KDE

by yes! (not verified)

Yes! We now have a full featured KDE 4 media player!

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Unfortunately, it's illegal to distribute.
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/multimedia/kplayer/COPYING-WARNING...
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/multimedia/kplayer/COPYING?r1=7106...

If you wonder why it's not being packaged anywhere, that's why. Complain to the author about his asinine licensing. Packagers have tried and he refused to change it.

by yes! (not verified)

"Asinine" is your opinion, which is fine. My humble opinion is that it is Trolltech who should be (and I am sure are) thinking about Qt licensing upgrade in the near future. After all, KPlayer is not the only Qt based project with a licensing conflict due to Qt incompatibility with GPLv3.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Yes, Trolltech should allow the GPLv3 for Qt. But the fact is that they currently don't, so it's silly to license an application which requires Qt under the GPLv3 only.

by SomeGuy (not verified)
by liquidat (not verified)

I just realized that there is no release name mentioned anywhere. Are names just things for Alphas and Betas?

by Adriaan de Groot (not verified)

Kuattro? Khetirie? Man, the possibilities of mangling words of ordinals in various languages are just *awesome*.

by reihal (not verified)

How about Katharsis?

by Anon (not verified)

++

by reihal (not verified)

Better save it to 4.1.

by sebas (not verified)

The name is the slogan is "be free.".

by Lee (not verified)

"will eat your children" ;)

by yman (not verified)

"Kid Krusher"

by anonymous (not verified)

This is great :)

by bsander (not verified)

Hats off big time to everyone who made this possible. I have followed the entire development process through Planet KDE, and am very confident that with all the skilled and talented people out there, KDE 4 will grow to become something seriously awesome.

So all you guys (coders, translators, writers, PR folks, everyone involved) should definitely crack open a cold one and celebrate, this is your moment and you've earned it! Again, hats off to all of you!

by motumboe (not verified)

my compliments to all the developers!

by bheil (not verified)

Very big thanks to all who contributed and especially for the upcoming KDE 4 series. KDE 3 is/was the best desktop out there and I bet KDE 4 will beat it on all ways.

by Miglen.com (not verified)

Applause to all of you, who made this version of KDE.
Best regards,
Miglen Evlogiev

by TheGreatGonzo (not verified)

Well done to everyone that worked towards this. Roll on 4.1.

Kubuntu packages are coming down the line now and building 4.1 on Lenny right now!!

Well done once again.

by Jochen Becker (not verified)

I am sharing you happiness and I hope KDE will be successfull as the KDE 3 Series now is. But I also hope it will become more configurable as it is now :(. This blessedly is the only big downer i found yet. I have not investigated this for later Versions.
So i am looking forward to the see what you guys make out of it.

nice regards

by Linus Berglund (not verified)

... Matthias Ettrichs post about "starting a linux gui" at http://groups.google.com/group/de.comp.os.linux.misc/msg/cb4b2d67ffc3ffce
and then thinking about how big KDE has become I almost start to cry :) This demonstrates the success of visions and opensource!

Thanks everyone involved!

by Dolphin-fanatic :) (not verified)

It was worth to read, thx!!

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

this may sound a bit.. odd. but this is one of the documents i read a couple times a year as part of my "keeping the context" ritual. =)

by Linus Berglund (not verified)

Nah. I have started to read it quite frequently myself for that reason, although not the kde context. More like to reassure myself that small things can actually lead to something big.

by Robert (not verified)

An interesting read indeed. "schnurz-purz-widgets" made my day! ;-)

by mihas10 (not verified)

Best relase of KDE! It is fast... on my 512 MB RAM system.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

Mine too :)