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Tuesday 07th of September 2010

K Desktop Environment (KDE)

KDE desktop environment screen shot

 

KDE logoKDE (K Desktop Environment) is a Free desktop environment for Unix-like systems. 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. These include KOffice, KDevelop, Amarok, K3b and many others. KDE software is based on the Qt toolkit. The licensing of this toolkit largely restricted KDE software to Free operating systems, but with the release of Qt 4 these restrictions have eased. This allows KDE software based on Qt 4 to be distributed on Windows and Mac OS X. Ports of KDE software to these platforms are underway.

Platform releases

Platform releases are major releases that begin a series (version number X.0). These releases are allowed to break both binary and source code compatibility with the predecessor, or to put it differently, all following releases (X.1, X.2, ...) will guarantee source & binary compatibility (API & ABI). This means, for instance, that software that was developed for KDE 3.0 will work on all (future) KDE 3 releases, in contrast to an application that was developed for KDE 2, which is not guaranteed to be able to make use of the KDE 3 libraries. KDE major version numbers follow the Qt release cycle meaning that KDE 4 is based on Qt 4, while KDE 3 was based on Qt 3.

Standard releases

There are two main types of releases, major releases and maintenance releases.

Major releases (with two version numbers, for example 3.5) contain new features. As soon as a major release is ready and announced, work on the next major release starts. A major release needs several months to be finished and many bugs that are fixed during this time are backported to the stable branch, meaning that these fixes are incorporated into the last stable release by maintenance releases. Starting with the KDE 4 series, KDE has a major release roughly every six months.

 

Maintenance releases have three version numbers, e.g. KDE 1.1.1, and focus on fixing bugs, minor glitches and making small usability improvements. Maintenance releases in general do not allow new features although some releases include small enhancements. A shortened release schedule is used. Starting with the KDE 4 series, KDE has a maintenance release roughly every month, except during the month of a major release.

Major applications for KDE include:

  • Amarok - Audio player
  • Dolphin - File manager
  • K3b - Optical disc authoring software
  • Kate - Text editor
  • KDevelop - Integrated development environment
  • Konsole - Terminal emulator
  • Kontact - Personal information manager featuring an e-mail client, a news client, a feed aggregator, To-do lists and more.
  • Kopete - Instant messaging client
  • Konqueror - Web browser
  • KOffice - Office suite
 

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