J_K9 @ Linux

Previewing KDE 4

January 14, 2006 on 6:58 pm | In Desktop Environments & Window Managers |

Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE developer’s laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux.

KDE 4 is set to rock the Window Manager world, and the new release really is going to have a myriad of new features - as well as vast speed tweaks on the old ones. In fact, so much is changing and being added that it’s almost impossible to summarize the new addons in this post!

In my opinion, these are the most important/flashy ones:

• Switching to Qt4, which brings a host of new capabilities when it comes to visuals (via the Arthur paint engine, which also allows hardware acceleration where available) and application design (improved threading, model/view), as well as having a smaller memory footprint and allowing us to write non-GUI apps that don’t require an X server
• Selecting a new multimedia system (aRts is unmaintained and not providing what we need) - GStreamer is the most probably candidate
• Replacing the desktop and panels with a new application called Plasma
• Introducing a new set of artwork (Oxygen) and bringing an updated human interface guidelines to bear; we will be making extensive use of the SVG format for these items
• Improvements to Qt’s memory footprint (a lot of effort went into making QObject and QWidget, the base classes for most of Qt, lighter in Qt4)
• Redesigning applications so they are able to be optimized better. For example, the desktop and panels are being merged into one app, which also provides for functionality now only available in Superkaramba. The resulting design allows us to much more efficiently share application launch, graphics, and geometry coordination data while also avoiding the overhead of multiple processes where just one will do quite fine. This will allow people to have quite flashy desktops (or even simple plain ones) that are snappier and take fewer resources.

I foresee a prettier, lighter, faster KDE desktop than ever before - and boy will it be nice! Pity there aren’t any pre-release screenshots yet…

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