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 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.
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.
Comments
I've just fixed this at http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/KDE4 .
thx!
Big thanks to all involved and congratulation to users :)
Congratulations! Thank you for your great work.
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.
Just wondering whether or not this excellent service will continue.
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!
then all I could say is this:
AAARRRRRR!
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)
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!
They said it couldn't be done .... Congratz guys! Feels very snappy here!
Thanks all your volunteers for making this possible....
Thanks for your hard work, it will pay off! KDE rocks!!
My eyes are having orgasms just looking at these screenshots! Thank you KDE developers, you are all amazing!
They will have continuous orgasms if you would install the real thing ;)
and your ears, too ;)
Um...
Those would be eargasms.
(sometimes the result of aural secks)
sorry.
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.
Thanks so much!!!
KDE is true! I like it :D
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
what about the Application Cleanup (http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE%204%20Application%20Cleanup) ?
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 ;)
Look at kde-apps, there's a KDE 4 KPlayer, just released!
/me dances and hugs KDE
Yes! We now have a full featured KDE 4 media player!
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.
"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.
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.
And now they do!!
http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/press.2008-01-18.160...
Code and you shall receive :)
I just realized that there is no release name mentioned anywhere. Are names just things for Alphas and Betas?
Kuattro? Khetirie? Man, the possibilities of mangling words of ordinals in various languages are just *awesome*.
How about Katharsis?
++
Better save it to 4.1.
The name is the slogan is "be free.".
"will eat your children" ;)
"Kid Krusher"
This is great :)
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!
my compliments to all the developers!
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.
Applause to all of you, who made this version of KDE.
Best regards,
Miglen Evlogiev
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.
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
... 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!
It was worth to read, thx!!
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. =)
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.
An interesting read indeed. "schnurz-purz-widgets" made my day! ;-)
Best relase of KDE! It is fast... on my 512 MB RAM system.
Mine too :)