bangalore is a beautiful city if you keep your eyes on the right bits of architecture, the trees and plants that grow. the foss.in event itself was really well put together. this year it was kept highly technical so the audience was correspondingly technical. it's really nice to be able to present kde4 these days compared to, say, 6 months ago.

As a die-hard GNOME user, I never really looked at KDE as a good alternative. This is probably complete ignorance on my part. I have never used KDE for more than a day or so or unless the situation required it. KDE is definitely an excellent desktop environment. Here are ten things I have found that I really like about it.

Just following the recent World Usability Day and a few months past the third birthday of OpenUsability I took some time to talk to Jan Mühlig, one of the OpenUsability founders and to get an inside look at some of the history of the project, how it works from the inside and some of the current direction.

If you want to start building KDE4, here are a few hints, gathered from the most frequent questions I hear.

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for July to September 2006. Topics covered include the outcomes from the 2006 membership meeting, the status of the Technical Working Group's improved charter, the new press channel from the Marketing Working Group and for the first time a report from the Sysadmin Team. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join KDE e.V.

for the last year or so there have been two sets of thoughts squirming in the back of my mind with regards to the name "kde" and how we're going to communicate what that means in a post-4.0 world.

For people like me, who are addicted to Klipper: Klipper has search as you type. Just click on the icon, and start typing away! Only the parts of your paste history that match the typed text will be shown.

• Scott Collins: kde 4

• KDE 4 Second Development Snapshot : A short review

The second KDE 4 developers snapshot is now available. This 3.80.2 release includes source from all the KDE modules. Application developers are strongly advised to work primarily on KDE 4 from now on.

With Krita's recent 1.6 release enhancing its usability for professional artwork, the Krita team is looking into creating a gallery where Krita users can contribute their art made with it.

Current kwin_composite branch can finally do some simple effects. This screenshot shows the animation for a newly appearing KWrite window. This time no manual hacking in of the effect, this is what is in SVN. Technically, right now kwin_composite should about match Kompmgr's possibilities.

Applications is what will bring people to Linux. But Firefox and Amarok aren’t the only apps to wow people with. The open source world looks to be succeeding in the e-mail realm as well. Introducing Kontact, KDE’s Personal Information Management application.

Also: Krita is a fully-loaded raster graphics workhorse that stands on its own.

Tonight in the People Behind KDE series of interviews we feature an Australian core hacker. He is very motivated in programming but his social life is as important. He focuses mainly on programming tools but works for core parts like kdeui too. We are talking about KDE star Hamish Rodda.

KDE together with the Athens University of Economics and Business and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and other partners has launched SQO-OSS. This is a two-year multi-million euro project that aims to develop new tools and techniques for measuring Open Source quality.

The Spanish KDE developers together with HispaLinux and ZaragozaWireless are organising a KDE Conference in Zaragoza, Spain on 4th and 5th of November. The talks will be in Spanish and the entrance is free.

Hello! Remember me? I’m the guy who wrote Three reasons to use KDE. This time, I’ll exercise my mind by coming up with three honest reasons not to use KDE. Of course, this is not an original idea either, since it was inspired by Three reasons not to use GNOME.

Sal Cangeloso’s writeup (three reasons to use GNOME) inspired me to talk about the flip side of the coin. Yes, I know it’s smug to pretend that there’s only KDE and GNOME; yet KDE is my desktop of choice, and here’s why. Of course, Sal’s right when he says lists are the effective way to convey information in writing, so I’ll take a page from his book and do so:

The annual KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2007 in the vibrant city of Glasgow. The week-long event for contributors to the leading Free Desktop project will be held from 30th June to 7th July 2007 in Scotland's largest city.

The KDE Project yesterday released KOffice version 1.6, the long awaited version of the open source office suite.

Many Linux users are savvy game experts. So, although computer games can be purely for fun, they also can train your mind. KDE's Edutainment suite is proof of that. The suite of packages lets users learn and have fun at the same time.