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So not only has my bright blue KDE hat been to several conferences and presentations made in the name of KDE, but it is now being worn in the field to do geophysics.

That's me, in a place where I get no cell phone service - the pic is taken by my assistant on my cell phone which I brought along nonetheless.

Cheers folks

Psst. For those that haven't tried the koffice 2 alphas yet, it rocks :)

Well, I've got a few new things to report afa user experiences go. First, I just bought my first laptop. I've had second-hand laptops in the past, but this is the first time I've bought a new one.

So I think I've got a funny story.

I was recompiling trunk to see how things are moving along, and I tend to live dangerously when I do this. More so than the average user, since I'm pretty familiar with the workings of the KDE build system, and what I can get away with.

Well folks, time has caught up with me and told me something needs to go: my thesis, faculty presidency, hockey, work, or KDE.

After briefly considering dropping out of my program to work on KDE full-time, I've decided that my KDE commitments have to go. Of course, I can't go without making a few parting remarks (and a shot or two) :)

First, some apologies:

So, this is a rant. Please don't quote me on this article, as my opinion might have changed a day after posting. In the meantime, there's a rant I've been meaning to write for a long time that I've put off since I'm officially wearing the KDE Marketing hat. Tonight, I take it off.

"Does KDE even need users?"

If the users are harming the project, we don't need those users. I've hesitated to tell these users to (quoting the recently deceased Carlin) "go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself."

So I spent the last few days rebuilding trunk and playing with some of the applications that don't ship on the same release cycles as KDE itself. Things like Amarok, KOffice, KTorrent, K3b, and more. So I figured I'd give a few comments on how the development of these things are going, especially KOffice 2. So, some thoughts on those applications that make the KDE environment the integrated, wonderful thing that a only full desktop environment can give.

Just in case you (like me) have been wondering what happened to extragear/base/plasma for the last week or so, and haven't yet popped into #plasma on freenode to inquire: many of the plasma modules not* now live in trunk/KDE/kdeplasmoids

Cheers folks, and happy hacking

*Edit: typo.

Well, I'd just like to raise my voice in the chorus of congratulations that are echoing throughout the web (and often hiding in the Firefox 3.0 stuff). Congratulations to the Wine project on Wine 1.0, from your friends at KDE :) I see your roadmap for post-1.1, and your list of supported apps and I wonder, is your 1.0 release the tipping point? Can people use a fully FOSS stack for everything these days?

Cheers, and thanks for your hard work.

There is an old saying that "Any press is good press", amongst the marketing types. Well, I was checking on KDE in various news sources today, and we must be getting a lot of "good" press. Is bad press still "good" press?

Anyway, first I'll link to the articles, so that you can read them and draw your own conclusions, then I'll give my take.

So today I was reading the Polish Linux article, part of a series that is periodically covered KDE from SVN (to the delight and occasional flaming of many fans) and it reminded me of how I ended up with this Marketing thing in the first place. It's been just under a year since my last Road to KDE 4 articles went live, and for shits and giggles, I thought I'd revisit them to see what has held together through the last year, what ended up as vapour, and so forth -- For my amusement more than anything else, although it might be interesting to some. So I present...