Following the development of KDE 4 can be daunting for casual observers. With all the colorfully named sub-projects like Oxygen, Solid, and Phonon that comprise this major rewriting of one of the main desktops for GNU/Linux, you can rapidly feel overwhelmed -- especially since the names rarely have relation to purposes.

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.

Linux users are as evangelical about desktop environments, the all-encompassing graphical user interface software responsible for providing everything from taskbars to office suites, as they are about operating systems. It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the first major release in over five years of the most popular desktop environment available is causing quite a stir.

The KDE development team, gathered at the aKademy event in Glasgow, Scotland on July 4 announced the immediate availability of the second alpha release of the K Desktop Environment v. 4.0. The eight-day-long aKademy continues through July 7 at the University of Strathclyde.