A bold beginning

KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series.

KDE 4 is largely built with Qt 4, the latest version of Trolltech's commercial open-source development platform. Qt 4 brings significant performance improvements to KDE and offers a lot of really sophisticated new features for developers, like the Arthur painting framework and Scribe text layout system. KDE 4 also inherits many of Qt 4's most valued attributes, particularly its high portability. As a result of KDE's migration to a powerful new CMake-based build system and beneficial changes in Trolltech's licensing model for Qt 4, the KDE developers can finally leverage Qt's inherent cross-platform compatibility to make KDE a truly platform-neutral desktop environment. One of the most exciting advancements brought about along with the move to Qt 4 is the emergence of a KDE Windows port and a Mac OS X port.

Some equally exciting additions in KDE 4.0 include the new Oxygen visual style, the Plasma desktop shell, the Dolphin file manager, the Phonon multimedia system, the Solid hardware layer, the Kross scripting framework, elaborate compositing visual effects, and the Strigi indexing system. The developers also performed extensive reorganization of the core KDE libraries to improve the platform APIs. There are so many new features that no single article could ever hope to address them all with adequate depth. For this review, I have attempted to narrow down the list and focus on a selection of core components. This article describes key features, evaluates various design decisions, provides insight into the developers' long-term vision and enumerates some current weaknesses and limitations.

While reading this article, it is important to keep in mind that KDE 4 is still largely incomplete. Many of the details provided in this article reflect the fact that the 4.0 release is not a finished product. The KDE development team controversially decided to release 4.0 in a premature state in order to stimulate user interest and promote accelerated development. The result is that KDE 4.0 is, in many ways, like a preview for developers and technical enthusiasts rather than a release for enterprise desktops and production environments. My extensive testing shows that KDE 4.0 can be used on a day-to-day basis, but there are many inconveniences posed by the software's current limitations. In this article, I will try to provide a balance of forward-looking analysis and detailed descriptions of the software's current state.

I conducted the vast majority of my testing with OpenSUSE 10.3 using the one-click KDE 4.0 installation method. I also tested briefly with Kubuntu 7.10 by installing from the Kubuntu KDE 4.0 installation ISO. Kubuntu and OpenSUSE both provide an adequate test environment for KDE 4.0, but I chose OpenSUSE for review testing because I feel that OpenSUSE currently provides a slightly more polished KDE 4.0 environment. Doing a full installation was quite time-consuming with both distributions, so those of you who just want a taste of the KDE 4.0 experience without having to install anything should consider trying the Live CDs.

I did not have compositing enabled during any of my tests. I could not get KWin compositing to work on either my desktop computer or my Dell Inspiron 1420n laptop. Compiz works out of the box in Ubuntu on the laptop, so I was quite surprised to find that KWin does not. It is worth noting that compositing is disabled by default in KDE 4.0. Those of you who want to explore the visual effects supported by KWin should be able to find some good videos on YouTube without much difficulty. This review will not address the subject further, though I will likely revisit it in a future article. This review will primarily focus on Oxygen, Plasma, Dolphin, Phonon, and Solid.