A new Desktop era with KDE 4.1

While the release of KDE 4.0 earlier this year is still kind of a Technology Preview rather than a full-blown release (considering lack of native applications, bugs, glitches and performance issues), it seems that KDE 4.1 will finally be not only a Desktop but an exciting all-in-one platform. A full-scale development environment will mean more than just the API. It will ensure consistency and stability of the system. What more, KDE expansion plans which include Windows may once for all sync the two worlds. Gnome had a similar attempt with GTK but it never went beyond porting GIMP and X-Chat to Windows.

Among features planned for the 4.1 release, Phonon and KHTML, both parts of kdelib, seem to be in the spotlight. Phonon will see VideoWidget improvements and back-end switching will be possible on-the-fly. Scrolling, improved CSS3 support and improved quirks-mode will hopefully provide a good alternative to Firefox.

The list of features is impressive and 4.1 will highly likely be a release that distro’s will adopt in place of the current feature-complete 3.5.x series. It is hard to tell exactly what impact will porting KDE to Windows have on both systems. It may even ditch the need for users to switch to Linux, but it may also be the other way around.

In any case, KDE showed that it is not simply copying other platforms, but has its own life-path. On the other side, Gnome has no current plans on catching up citing that their philosophy is quite different from KDE and, for that matter, other Desktop Environments.

One thing is for sure though, Linux is becoming a powerful player in the desktop segment.