This month the KDE Community announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

KDE4 has a lot of hype. It is a significant change, reportedly a big jump forward. There is a lot of new technology and names: Plasma, Oxygen, Phonon, Okular, Solid and more . Depending on what you read, and where you read it, it is either the second coming of the DE Christ, or the first coming of the DE Anti-christ.

I am always on the lookout for a new way of doing things when it comes to personal computing, and one of the best ways to do so is to experiment with different window managers for Linux.

My 71 year-old father has agreed to try Ubuntu on his home PC. He has used Windows for years, but after his XP system became so infected with viruses and other malware that I needed to wipe his system, he's willing to try Linux. I've promised I'll reload XP if this experiment fails.

Dolphin was intended to replace Konqueror as the default file manager in KDE 4. The scope of Dolphin was to only provide a compact and easy-to-use file manager, without all the features and uses Konqueror has. And (I think) it succeeded. In the beginning most of the users were reticent regarding this idea, since Konqueror provided anything one could possibly ask from a file manager.

With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged.

I have a passion for photography and have become heavily entrenched in the tools available on Mac OS X, such as Aperture and Photoshop. This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

KDE announces 4.9 releases of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. Version 4.9 provides many new features, along with improved stability and performance.

An education supplies company has announced a portable science education computer that runs embedded Debian Linux. Pasco says it designed its sensor-equipped Spark Science Learning System for collaborative science experiments by students, for example measuring conductivity or tracking temperature changes.