KDE hackers have been working on polishing the new features, desktop integration, and documenting and translating the packages. Several bugfixing sessions have been held and squashed bugs in the beta software. Testing and feedback on this release is appreciated and needed to make the final KDE 4.1 release in late July 2008 a splash.

"Reddit just feels a true love for the open source community and feel they owe it to that community to be open."

As schools analyze alternatives to hefty licensing fees, LUGs and Linux-in-education organizations are pointing out that Open Source solutions are better suited to the educational environment, and are only a fraction of the cost.

When Google released Google Gadgets for Linux many could see strong similarities to KDE 4 Plasma desktop shell widgets (Plasmoids). As it turns out developers of Google Gadgets are already working on integrating Google Gadgets with Plasma. This will enable Google Gadgets to run as native Plasmoids on the KDE 4 desktop.

KDE 4.0.5 comes with several bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates. KDE continues to release updates for the 4.0 desktop on a monthly basis. KDE 4.1, which will bring large improvements to the KDE desktop and applications will be released in July this year.

Thanks to KDE 4 Plasma magic the video is nicely integrated into the context view of the user interface of Amarok 2. This feature is especially handy for watching YouTube videos, and they're working on integrating it directly with their SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye.

The KDE Project is proud to announce the first beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 1 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 1 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in July 2008. Highlights: Plasma grows up, Kontact returns, applications grow, refinement throughout the frameworks.

Simon Schmeisser has managed to integrate Marble (a geographical map widget) as a Flake Shape into KPresenter. As a flake shape you can change the map according to your liking even after it has been embedded into the KOffice application.