This Wednesday in KDE land sees the start of the Release Freeze for KDE 4.0, anticipating a final release in December. By then, KDE 4 will have been in development for two years and five months, counting from the aKademy conference in Malaga, Spain, in July 2005.

Whenever you're dealing with a piece of software as large as a desktop, some features are going to be hard to find. To help new users get up and running, here are twelve tips for getting more out of KDE. Many are available from the KDE Control Center, a centralized configuration window with a daunting array of options, but others are located elsewhere.

If you're reading this on Kubuntu, then I honestly feel sorry for you. It's not that I hate KDE (in fact, I love it, even v3.5), it's just how badly misused it is in Kubuntu.

KDE has to be the most correctly integrated environment I’ve seen. Everything just fits and works perfectly with one another.

I used to switch between KDE's Kontact and GNOME's Evolution. But it's been a long time since I've looked back at the latter. I finally settled on Kontact to keep me in touch with the reality of my hectic daily schedule. See how you can keep up...

KDE's window-specific settings feature gives you a fine level of control over the way windows behave. It lets you change settings such as minimum/maximum size, position, overlay, and transparency. The GIMP uses multiple windows to select tools, tool options, and other items used in the process of image editing.

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.