jonathan carter

Tomorrow is the release of KDE 4, one of the most eagerly awaited software releases for 2008, and it’s interesting to see how the various GNU/Linux distributions are coping with it.

Debian

In Debian, they will be shipping with KDE 3.5 (most likely 3.5.9), since KDE 4 will not yet ship with all the components that a user would expect. The biggest part that is missing is the Kontact groupware client suite. Debian users will however, be able to download and install KDE 4.0 from experimental. Read all about it in the debian-devel-announce post from the Debian Qt/KDE team, I enjoyed the part at the end:

P.S.: Anyway, you never know what the future will bring, we will review our decisitions with respect shipping KDE 4 in Lenny in a few months.

So anything possible, I think it would be really cool if a user could easily install KDE 4.0 in Lenny if they wanted to.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu (or I should rather say Kubuntu), is more future orientated, and follows its philosophy of release early and release often. The Kubuntu team will maintain both KDE 4 and KDE 3.5 packages for Ubuntu 8.04, which means that users get easy access to both the latest cutting edge software, and they get to use the rock solid, tried and tested version if they need to do so. Future Kubuntu development will however, be focussed on KDE 4, read the post by Jonathan Riddell to the kubuntu-devel list for the details.

The downside is that the Kubuntu packages for 8.04 won’t fall under the Canonical LTS (Long Term Support) banner. I don’t think this is a problem though, within a year we will probably see a KDE 4.1 release, which would be much more complete and bullet proof, and I doubt anyone would actually want to run KDE 4.0 after 18 months when there would be vastly superior versions available. I think both these distributions made sane decisions. I’m not really following what the other distributions will be doing, but I’m sure there will be lots of noise about it after tomorrow