Hi Laurie and all, On Thursday 03 Dec 2009 17:22:30 Laurie Clark-Michalek wrote:

In the spirit of all the desktop haters, is anyone here (apart from me) looking forward to KDE 4.4? From this angle, that is, not minding dbus too much, it looks to be very promising. They have some interesting stuff due to be merged into the trunk, like tabbed window management, revamped oxygen, and other such things. I took the time to read their feature list for 4.4 and it all looks good.

Yeah, as someone who's used KDE since version 1.0, I find myself looking forward to new KDE releases more and more at the moment, since the pace of development has been so fast lately when compared to other software. I think that the tabbed and tiling window management has the potential to change the way I work quite a bit. One thing I do miss (though it's still present, it hasn't received much attention lately) is the canvas functionality of Konqueror. I loved the idea that I could throw any kind of file (html, pdf, directory, text etc) from any location (disk, sftp, http etc) and it just knew what to do with it and handled it transparently. I always used to have programs running as their kparts inside Konqueror and use konqueror windows to logically separate my activities (one for work, one for web pages I'm reading etc). The shift in recent months (years?) has been towards standalone applications, which I think is downplaying what has always been one of KDE's strongest features. I'm hoping that whenever the KHTML / Webkit argument is won and a top of the line KDE web browsing component is all polished, that it doesn't signal the end of Konqueror as a kparts canvas in favour of only having the choice of a standalone web browser. Then again, perhaps the KDE strategists have in mind the tabbed window management as a different way of doing this, but I don't think that can provide all the functionality.

Also, does anyone have any opinions on their changing of KDE to KDE SC (KDE Software Compilation)? Personally, it feels a bit silly, and I imagine KDE will continue to prevail, but it's not too important anyway.

I guess they're trying to reflect the fact that there's much more to KDE than just a desktop environment these days... depending on what you call a desktop environment! It's potentially not the best exercise in brand management though... Pete.