KDE 4.0 released
Posted by Thiago Macieira
in KDE, News
on Friday, January 11, 2008 @ 17:32

If you read Planet KDE or the news at all, you must be already aware that KDE 4.0.0 has been released. It’s all people are blogging about, so I think I should give my contribution to the crowd and congratulate everyone who has participated. Trolltech also sends its regards with this press release.



KDE 4 is the product of hundreds or thousands of contributors: developers, artists, technical writers, usability experts, beta testers, promotion people and, why not, users too. All of those who downloaded and ran one of the alphas, betas or RC and came to one of our IRC channels contributed to making it possible. It’s the result of two and a half years of work on top of KDE 3.5 — adding to the 9 years of KDE 1.x, 2.x and 3.x work.

I was a developer already when KDE 3.0 came out, but I was away from KDE at the time, tending to other businesses. Besides, the KDE 4.0 release is more closely related to the 2.0 release, when I was still playing around with KDE code. And when our codebase was much, much smaller.

Really… there’s no comparison to the KDE 4.0 release. Do you realise how many applications have just been released? How many lines of code that is? (Coverity says it’s 4.7 million, but it’s including apps not released today — by the way, we have one of the lowest defect/LOC ratio and by far the lowest in the >1 million line-of-code range).

We at Trolltech are very pleased to see it happening, not only because many of us are KDE developers too (about 15, I guess). KDE is the largest and most visible product (or, should I say, “suite of products”) made with Qt, which means we get a lot of feedback from KDE developers. The development of KDE version 4 has been no exception with thousands of suggestions sent to us. What’s more, Phonon and WebKit, major new features for the next version of Qt, are innovations that originate from the KDE Project.

Our developers on the Unix/X11 platform are all using KDE (with a few exceptions). Some have already migrated to KDE 4, others will follow soon, as soon as Linux distributions start providing packages. This is great for us, because we can readily see the effects of our changes in the KDE applications. With KDE 4 also going even more cross-platform, onto Windows and Mac, all our developers will be able to play this game. :-)

We are also a bit afraid now… Can you imagine the flood of reports we’ll get? The rest of the KDE 3 applications will be ported soon, generating queries, suggestions and bug reports to our support engineers and development team.

I’m sure it’ll be fun. I’m glad I’m here to witness this happening and to be part of the dream coming true.

Congratulations everyone!

PS: the #kde4-devel IRC channel is now gone. Long live #kde-devel!