I know it is not so nice to complain and bash a project when you don't contribute to it. And yes until now, I did not contributed to the KDE4 desktop as I wished. I compiled it regularly and used the libraries, but did not run the KDE4 desktop or KDE4 version of the applications except KDevelop and Quanta.

I installed KDE4 on my desktop today so I could finally try out KWin in all its glory. If you haven't tried it yet I highly recommend it. KDE4 with desktop effects enabled is simply gorgeous. It's fast, responsive, and comes with a nice array of effects options.

It is so good to see that a lot of work during KDE4 development went into improving the quality of the user experience. Unlike their KDE3 counterparts, the best KDE4 applications are definitely more user-oriented. Despite being a developer, I enjoy this as much as every other person would. It is equally good to see almost all KDE4 applications being fast. The optimizations behind the scene in Qt and KDE frameworks already showed up, but I think that this is only a start. We will definitely see even more performance improvements in the future.

With the release of version 4.3, the majority of users finally seem to accept -- if not necessarily love -- the changes in KDE4. At this point, it seems fair to ask: How successful are the KDE 4 series of releases?

One of the things that's been frustrating me a lot lately is all the negative press about KDE4. And the Gnome fanboys have been having a blast with it. I want to state explicitly here and now, STOP PICKING ON KDE4!!

With 4.0's release, the technology of KDE4 isn't the only thing we find ourselves at the starting line of. As many of you have probably noticed, a theme for our KDE4 promotion campaigns was also unveiled using the slogan "Be Free".

Well I simply love KDE4 but one thing that really annoyed me was the way firefox looked in KDE4 and so after googling a bit I found some simple solutions to make firefox look more Kde4ish.

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

Aaron Seigo has published a list of changes and new features to Plasma, the desktop shell for KDE4, that will be included in KDE4.3. This list is quite long, so I will only try to show the most important changes.