Summary: Qt5 finds its way into the very core of KDE, arguably the best desktop environment in the world (most features-rich)

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has undergone some major changes in recent years, development-wise. Some say that development stagnated, whereas others say that it's as good as ever before. The death of Nokia in Microsoft's hands has certainly not helped the toolkit upon which KDE is based (Qt), but there are signs of progress because the lead KWin developer merged in Qt5 [1,2], with evident development pace accompanying this milestone [3-6].

Amarok, which was seemingly abandoned for some time after a botched bunch of releases, is back in active development with funding from Google [7] and old KDE applications refuse to become deprecated [8] (Krusader and Konqueror are still better than Dolphin in many respects). There are even active surveys [9] regarding the development of KDE and polls which determine the best KDE distro of 2013 [10].

KDE is anything but dead. It's my desktop environment of choice and after some bad reputation it received in the 4.0-4.1 releases people should definitely give it a go. It's now hopping on the Qt5 train, later to be followed by the "5" branch of KDE -- the first major leap in several years. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Next step: dogfooding

   Almost a month since my last blog post. And of course lots of work in KWin in the frameworks-scratch branch since then – about 160 commits. Today I finally reached the next milestone: dogfooding. I dared to replace the KWin of my working session by the new version based on Qt 5 and it’s useable.





2. Qt5-Based KDE KWin Enters Usable State

   The next-generation KDE KWin window manager for KDE Frameworks 5 and using the Qt 5.x tool-kit is quickly entering a usable state and can now handle "dogfeeding" by its developers.





3. KDE Commit-Digest for 4th August 2013





4. KDE Commit-Digest for 11th August 2013





5. KDE Commit-Digest for 18th August 2013





6. KDE Commit-Digest for 25th August 2013





7. Wishfix part 2: Amarok.

   Once upon a time Linux had what I think was the best music player/manager, its name was Amarok and people even brought it up as a way to try convince others to move to Linux, intelligent playlists, auto fetching of cover arts, lyrics, last.fm integration, etc, and it was great. Fast forward a few years (almost a decade to be fair) and now Amarok and all KDE music players seems to be lacking, with KDE 5.0 maybe this is the time to fix it.





8. 10 reasons why you should try Krusader

   Find out 10 reasons why you should try Krusader, a twin-pane file manager that might be faster than Dolphin on older computers or just a better match for your computing habits.





9. KScreen Management Survey Results Posted

   Björn Balazs has posted the results of a recent user survey in a "study about the requirements for the screen management tool KScreen." The purpose was to find out how important screen management is to users and which setting configurations are needed most to aid in development of the Kscreen.





10. Best KDE distro of 2013

    Normally, at the end of the year, I tend to run my best annual distro roundups, choosing the finest among five operating systems or flavors thereof that showed the greatest promise in terms of stability, usability, elegance, support, and other curious items in the outgoing twelve-month period. But I have never dedicated much thought to selecting the best implementation of any one particular desktop environment, regardless of the system underneath.