All the way up until KDE 4.1, I was a Gnome user. I didn’t love it, but I preferred it over KDE and XFCE. I gave KDE 4.0 a try within VirtualBox, with thanks to Suse 11.0. It looked good, but there were enough online reviews to tell me that it was a case of “close, but no cigar“. Anyway… I’m now a die hard Fedora-KDE fanboy, and it’s the first time I’ve really felt “at one” with the desktop environment I use every day. And today I was reminded of just why I love Fedora as much as I do…
On the 9th February 2010, KDE 4.4 was made available as the most recent KDE release. Some Distro’s have a clear policy on significant upstream software releases, and for most, this is to be labelled a “feature” for their forthcoming distro release. For example… KDE 4.3->4.4, Gnome 2.26->2.28, Kernel 2.6.28->2.6.30.
It gives me a feel good moment when I log into the #fedora-kde IRC channel to find that there is a sense of urgency to push KDE 4.4 to the official Fedora updates repository. Let me stress the importance of the nature for such a decision… The Kubuntu community, for instance, have decided to push the KDE 4.4 upgrade to the PPA Backports repository. This means that if someone really wants KDE 4.4, they have to go enable that repository and download it. However, the average, non-techy user – Joe Bloggs, that is lucky enough to have installed Fedora-KDE will turn on his PC in the next 24-48 hours, to find some updates waiting in his system tray. He’ll download them, and be using KDE 4.4 in no time at all. The fact that this rebase to KDE 4.4 is being pushed to the Fedora-Updates repo is, for me, a symbolic representation of why we love using Fedora
Here’s a quick peek at the going’s on in the IRC channels earlier….
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[18:03] <rdieter> killefiz: ping ^^ ? whatcha think? pull the trigger now? wait ?
[18:04] <rdieter> thomasj: please update the wiki, if you havent yet. (otherwise, thanks)
[18:04] <thomasj> rdieter, whoops, on it
[18:06] <thomasj> wiki done
[18:06] <rdieter> mucho danke
[18:07] <thomasj> you’re very welcome
[18:11] <rdieter> still waiting on kdebase-workspace-4.4.0-3.fc11, kdebase-workspace-4.4.0-3.fc12, kde-l10n-4.4.0-1.fc12 to finish building
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I’m logging off for the night, and I’m sure that, by the weekend, I’ll be a KDE 4.4 user. Kudos to the KDE maintainers for Fedora. As Paul Mellors said here , if you ever fancy sending a message of appreciation, I propose you hunt out the Fedora packager of your favourite KDE application, and fire him/her a note of gratitude… (My favourite KDE app is Kile).
