OStatic

KDE fans are in for a treat today. The KDE Project released its KDE Software Compilation 4.4 today, spot on time and with more than 1,433 new features. The project has also decked out the KDE Website with a fresh new design. Code-named Caikaku, this release brings social media features to Plasma and a brand-new netbook interface for users who dig the tiny notebooks.

The Plasma Netbook is debuting in 4.4.0 as an alternative to the standard Plasma Desktop shell. Specifically designed for small screens, it has a full-screen app launcher and is ready to work with touchscreen devices. It's been in development for some time. The interface features a special newspaper layout that organizes KDE applets (plasmoids) to better make use of limited space.

The KDE team is getting very close to a final release of KDE 4.4. The second release candidate came out yesterday as a testing platform for users and developers to find and squash bugs before the final release date of February 9th.

The 4.4 release brings quite a few changes over 4.3, new applications, enhancements, and much more. Bloggers will find a new blogging tool, Konqueror has been beefed up with a history sidebar, KDE's groupware has received several improvements including POP3 support in Akonadi and other changes.

Let's face it. Even though open source conferences, conventions, and projects have seen an increase in the number of female participants, there's a strikingly male majority in the world of free software. While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework.

The approach? Think Google Summer of Code -- complete with internships, mentors, and sponsors -- with an emphasis on team contributions rather than stand-alone projects.

The GNOME Foundation has announced its annual conference, GUADEC, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands, July 24-30, 2010. More than 500 from the GNOME community are expected to attended the event and come together to discuss the future of the popular desktop for Linux.

GUADEC 2010 will focus on three primary themes: government, education, and end users. These are the same themes as GNOME 3.0, which is due to launch in September, 2010.

Typical Linux desktop options like KDE and GNOME? limit the way computer users interact with the applications and programs on their systems. There's not much to do beyond opening and closing an app, and moving or resizing a window. The development team behind ?toil? is building a desktop interface that aims to stand that idea on its head and let users create workflows that work best for them.

The GNUstep-based environment is built with lightweight and modular components that allow users to combine project- and document-oriented activities (or, services, as the ?toil? team calls them) more easily.

Churning out an x.0 software release must be akin to becoming a new parent -- the event exudes promise, joy, and hope, yet is simultaneously humbling, exhausting, and terror-inducing. While it isn't realistically possible to plan out detailed roadmaps for your children's long-term future, it's crucial to do so for a software project. While whether the presence of a carefully planned roadmap makes progress more or less stressful depends largely on who you ask and at what point you're asking, a project with clearly outlined goals and direction has a much better shot at sustained developer interest and solid releases.

Many projects grapple with this, and as GNOME pushes towards its 3.0 milestone, the GNOME Release Team talks about the voyage to this point -- and how best to travel forward from where it currently stands.

Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced that Sugar Labs is coming onboard as part of GNOME's Advisory Board. Sugar Labs will be represented on the board by executive director Walter Bender.

The GNOME and KDE projects recently decided that their upcoming developer events -- GUADEC and Akademy, respectively -- will be held simultaneously in the same location. Both projects hope this will foster communication and collaboration between their developer pools, and ultimately strengthen open source desktops.

The joint event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, will be held July 3-11, 2009, in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), and will be hosted by Cabildo, Gran Canaria's local government.