KDE4 buzz

KDE4 - understanding the buzz.

There has been a great deal of buzz lately about KDE4 and especially Plasma. People are talking excitedly on Osnews and Slashdot about what KDE4 will bring. Many other people are asking where they can see what new features are being developed at the moment, and other signs of progress. These people have been a little disappointed to hear that while a lot of hard work has been happening on KDE4 development, almost no progress has been made that’s clear to the casual observer. So what really is happening? To understand that, we need to take a look at Qt.

What is Qt?

Qt is a library to build user interfaces. It provides most of the graphical elements in a KDE application, such as menus and buttons and the text input field I’m writing this article in. KDE4 will be a change to a new major version of the Qt library, Qt4, and the very first step to KDE4 development is to ‘port’ the existing KDE3 codebase over to this new library. The new library has changed in ways that means the current code has to be fixed up and modified to run under the new library. For a project the size of KDE, this is a gargantuan task.

Qt4

Qt4 will bring a wealth of new benefits to KDE. The library is lighter on memory and the changes to QStyle make Qt/KDE integration in apps like OpenOffice easier. There is now a GPL’d version for Microsoft Windows which allows people to port KDE applications to Windows. The KDE developers agree that Qt4 is much easier to code for, helping them deliver better quality code.

In more technical areas, the library has been split so that QtCore is now seperate from the gui components. This means that developers can now write C++ console mode applications and still benefit from using Qt. A new painting system - ‘Arthur’ - promises to bring new levels of eye candy. By the time KDE4 is released, we’ll see a new xorg release with even more features to exploit for performance and asthetics.

Before any new features can be added to KDE and projects like Plasma can get underway, the porting of KDE to Qt4 has to be completed. The new Qt version means requirements for binary and functionality compatibility are relaxed and some major restructuring of KDE applications can and will occur now that wasn’t able to happen throughout the 3.X series.

What this means for KDE4

So, with that all said what has been accomplished so far? Kdelibs builds and kdebase can be made to build if you tell make to ignore errors. Once built, quite a few core KDE apps run - albeit with some glitches, particularly in strange colours and artifacts drawing windows. Kicker is running with most of the default applets, except the clock and the desktop pager. Kwin and Kdesktop run, although Kdesktop isn’t showing destkop wallpaper or chosen colour. Konsole is working with some redrawing issues. Konqueror as a file manager has some serious drawing issues, but seems to be working reasonably well as a webbrowser. Kate works for editing local files

Below are some screenshots of the few apps that are running. Be sure to check back after the 3.5 release to see This Month in SVN as it switches to bring to you the latest news in KDE4 development.

(Click for larger images)

Konqueror in filemanaging and webbrowsing mode

Konsole, Kcontrol and the KNetAttach wizard

Kate, the File dialog and the About KDE window