KDE 4.4 enters beta, bring on mainstream computing

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Just a quick post to recognize the fact that KDE 4.4 has reached its first beta release. The final version is due in early February. Following an extensive report on its progress I’m now convinced more than ever that KDE – now “KDE Software Compilation” for the main desktop environment – represents the best opportunity for an open source desktop to garner mainstream computing appeal.

Windows 7 appeals to the mainstream computing audience (albeit with a little help from OEMs), as does Mac OS X, but which open source desktop does?

Does GNOME appeal to the masses? For techies most certainly, but the mainstream may be moving away. Here’s why.

The default desktop environment for the Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE (business edition) Linux distributions is GNOME. Those three also happen to be the most popular, which means GNOME is shoved in front of people as the “experience” of Linux on the desktop.

But things are changing the way of KDE.

Recently the OpenSUSE project decided to let the people decide which desktop they would like shipped as the default – GNOME or KDE. After a fine example of software democracy in action, the vote was a clear win for KDE.

Granted, before Novell acquired SUSE Linux a few years ago the default desktop was in fact KDE, but nonetheless it was a sign that KDE can compete well with GNOME for the default spot.

Also, the Mandriva 2010 release decided to change its default desktop from GNOME to KDE 4.3. Mandriva began life as Mandrake Linux in France about a decade ago and after a little turmoil (it filed for Chapter 11 in 2003) has settled into offering a set of community (open source) and commercial products and services around its Linux distribution.

The dichotomy of those two decisions is interesting in itself. On the one hand a group of community members voted for KDE in a very open source manner, and on the other a commercial business decided to ship a different product from a “top down” point of view.

At the extreme end of the scale, a few years ago Patrick Volkerding’s Slackware Linux distribution (not as popular as others, but still maintains an avid following) decided to drop GNOME from the base distribution citing package integration complexity as one of the main reasons.

The best things going for GNOME are its applications, but those too are under increasing pressure from their KDE equivalents.

Incidentally, one point of contention among Linux aficionados about the direction of GNOME is its apparent increasing reliance on applications developed with the Mono language and bindings.

I won’t start a slanging match as to the merit of using Mono for open source applications – there’s enough of that already – but I will say Nokia’s recent decision to add the LGPL licence option to Qt has also alleviated many developer concerns about including it in their software.

In short, using Qt/C++/KDE for open source application development is just as (if not, more) appealing as Mono/GTK#/GNOME.

With the KDE 4 vision finally coming to fruition in version 4.4, now all that’s left is for the developers to fill any feature/application gaps between it an competing desktops, not just GNOME.

In many ways KDE is ahead of the competition, but there are still some “missing links” that prevent it from being as good as anything out there.

Let 4.4 beta begin the road to completion.