Previewing the upcoming KDE 4

Neowin.net - Where unprofessional journalism looks better: "Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE developer's laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux.

John Littler: The new features I remember include a bucketload of bug fixes, a universal messaging client, and a big cleanup of the GUI. Are there more things that you should mention?
Aaron J. Seigo: For KDE4, there is a lot more than just this. We are:switching to Qt4, which brings a host of new capabilities when it comes to visuals (via the Arthur paint engine) and application design (improved threading, model/view), as well as having a smaller memory footprint and allowing us to write non-GUI apps that don't require an X server

Other additional features include extensive use of SVG graphics which allow for resolution independent images, improvements to X.org's acceleration architecture, redesigning applications so they are able to be optimized better. Seigo explains that 'For example, the desktop and panels are being merged into one app, which also provides for functionality now only available in Superkaramba. The resulting design allows us to much more efficiently share application launch, graphics, and geometry coordination data while also avoiding the overhead of multiple processes where just one will do quite fine. This will allow people to have quite flashy desktops (or even simple plain ones) that are snappier and take fewer resources.'"