KDE 4.1 Desktop review

This review focuses on KDE 4.1, the latest release the K Desktop Environment series. It was officially released on July 29th, 2008. There is no much hype regarding the new release since the older 4.0 was full of bugs. Still KDE remains one of the favorite desktop environment for GNU/Linux OS till date.

KDE 4.1 comes with significant positive changes in graphics and desktop experience. But still its not error free which is disappointing. The entire set of desktops, frames and panels are collectively called plasma in the new version(KDE4). This replaces the old Kdesktop in the older version. A new multimedia interface called Phonon has been added.This makes the KDE desktop enviornment independent of any particular media backend. Decibel is a new applicaition framework introduced in KDE to incorporate all the communication protocols in general to the K desktop. The amjor technologies introduced in KDE 4 could be summarised as follows:

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1. Plasma : A desktop and panel widget engine
2. Phonon : A multimedia framework
3. Solid : A device integration framework
4. Sonnet : A spell checker
5. ThreadWeaver : A library to more effectively use multiprocessor systems

The release of KDE 4 and 4.1 invited mixed response from the web community. It was criticized on the grounds of instability of desktop and applications. But there are a lot of revolutionary changes made to KDE 4 for which it was praised by the KDE fans.

What does the project fork term mean in open source terminology ?

When the source code of one open source software is copied entirely to modify and make a new one, it is called a fork. Usually forks are produced as a result of efforts to produce a new product with different point of view (goal) than the original product.

Forks are most common in Linux distributions. The most common example of fork is the Ubuntu project. It is a famous freely shipped Linux distro. But many of the non-techies dont know that it was forked from the first major Linux distribution in the world, Debian. Many of us even don't know that such a distribution exists. While in this case forking is friendly, many cases it can result in a war between forked and the original product.

Forking is one of the major drawbacks of the open source license. One can simply copy and change its name to make an entirely new product and can distribute. Such a situation is harmful for the software community since it duplicates the efforts put to develop the software and creates confusion among users to choose the product.

Fear of forking essay