Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Each student quickly presents his work done during the summer holidays.

KRunner is one of those KDE applications that people generally take for granted. Since it has the same shortcut key, Alt+F2, as Gnome’s Run Application terminal, those who have just started using KDE generally assume that it is just another version of Gnome’s Run Application terminal. However, it cannot be farther from the truth. In reality KRunner is one of KDE 4.3’s most useful application.

PCLinuxOS is a fork of Mandriva and opened up in 2007 with a lot of potential because of its easier installation process and best preserved features of the original OS

This year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

Video Demo of KDE 4.3 on blip.tv .

KDE 4.3 was released this week with a number of intriguing improvements. Ars test the new version, which introduces KDE's Social Desktop initiative, an effort to bring social networking integration to the popular desktop environment.

First of all, let’s talk about the good things. KDE 4.3 is stable. Very stable. It seemed apparent from the start that the KDE developers were taking no prisoners with the stability of this release.
The Bad

* Desktop effects are more of a curse than a blessing
* Items on the taskbar rearrange themselves

Let’s bust some myths today because a majority of KDE 4 haters out there have the same reasons for hating it. I’m pretty sick of seeing posts and news articles about “why I don’t like KDE 4″ and then seeing that the real reason the person is upset is because they don’t spend an extra few moments trying to figure things out…aka lazy and ignorant.