There are only few people who know that if you look out of your 'Windows', the world is much more vivid and beautiful. Apple is known for its good looks, but it’s excessively expensive, while Vista is a big disappointment (check Tech Cold War 2007!). Now, there is GNU/Linux which, in fact, is free and offers much more options and freedom than Windows or Mac. One of the most popular desktop environments on GNU/Linux platform has come out in a new flavour - KDE 4.0.
The good news for Windows users is KDE 4.0 can be installed on Windows as well; while using a Windows machine you can take a dive into the ocean of powerful applications, awesome user experience and the freedom Richard M Stallman talks about. An advanced user can compile KDE 4.0 for Windows through the toolkit available, but an ordinary 'click-next' user will have to wait for a while for the Windows-ready-to-install KDE version.
Today’s release has a strong Indian connection. For the first time the announcement will be made in five Indian languages as well, namely Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam.
According to Pradeepto Bhattacharya of KDE, “For the first time the release announcement will be made in five Indian languages also. While Ravishankar is looking after the Hindi translation, Kartik Mistry, a Debian developer, is contributing to the translation in Gujarati. He also does Gujarati translation for Firefox and Open Office.org. Runa Bhattacharjee is driving the Bengali translation, Shriramadhas is pushing the Tamil language translation and Ashik from Swantantra Malayalam Team is working on Malayalam traslation.”
Discussing the tech side, Bhattacharya said, “KDE Libs has been improved and new libraries have been added. Phonon - is the new multimedia library and Solid is the hardware integration framework. KDEPIM, Akonadi, the PIM back-end will be included in the future releases."
Now, all the FOSS folks don't need this introduction, but for Windows users, who have been trapped in that pre-historic Windows, KDE 4.0 desktop environment is a breather. KDE is a free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use desktop environment. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard, the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology, such as KOffice, KDevelop, Amarok, K3b and many more.
While KOffice is a better replacement to Microsoft's expensive and heavy Office Suite, (you can also try OpenOffice.org suite which is a powerful suite and is for free), Amarok is the rocking music player, which, if you once use, will change your whole perception about a music player! And K3b is powerful CD/DVD writing software. These are just some of the software from the whole gamut of applications that KDE offers.
“KDE 4.0 is based on Qt 4, and is completely re-written. The memory foot print has improved and it now offers Plasma desktop with all those jazzy icons and themes. The Oxygen team has worked very hard to give the eye-candy icons to the KDE 4.0 desktop,” told Bhattacharya
“The KDE 4.0 has improved Dolphin as the file manager and Konqueror is the default browser. It includes Ocular as the document viewer which has beautiful usability features. We have worked with the Open Usability group on this and it supports many file formats,” he added.
“I would like to mention the KDE Edu which has improved a lot. This could be a best resource for schools,” said Bhattacharya. The goal of the project is to develop free educational software within the KDE environment. This software is mainly aimed to schools and to parents at home. Unlike the Windows-based software which are expensive, KDE Edu is free and can be used by school to give better education to students without increasing free or cost for schools (visit The KDE Education Project )
The countdown begins; keep an eye on Dot.KDE to see the announcement.
