We've been playing with KDE 4 for the past few days. Actually, there was very little playful about it. We're nothing if not honest. We struggled. We even used phrases that would make a sailor blush.

We do, now, have a (mostly) working install of KDE 4 on Xubuntu. And we stand by what we said with our first impressions. KDE 4 is fast, and does have the potential to be a powerful and utilitarian desktop.

However, it's just not there yet.

A few of the major issues we encountered we have since solved.

Updates can be made to a system that doesn't have a root account using gksu and Synaptic, or via the console. It seems there is a problem with calling kdesu. The other solution, of course, is to give root a password. This was a bit disappointing, but it certainly wasn't a deal breaker.

On January 11th, 2008, at roughly 7 am ET, KDE 4 became available for download. Not that we were refreshing our browsers or anything in anticipation. Packages are currently available for Kubuntu (Hardy and Gutsy), Debian (in the experimental branch), Fedora (in the Rawhide repository), and openSuSE. ArkLinux and Mandriva packages will be available soon.

We had two main questions. What's new? What doesn't work as intended?

The short answer to the first question: Just about everything.

The short answer to the second: A few things. The most notable being that in Kubuntu (and I would assume any distro that relies on sudo instead of root to install packages), Adept still won't accept your sudoer password. We worked around this by giving root a password, and then starting adept. It worked, but it really shouldn't have been necessary.

There's one thing for certain: Now is an exciting time to be a KDE user. The much anticipated launch of KDE 4 is slated for January 11th, 2008. This is a major revamp of the look and feel of the KDE desktop, with the inclusion of a built-in compositor (think eye candy) and something called "plasmoids" (little functional widgets embedded into your desktop).

It's a lot of new bling aimed at improving the desktop experience. Will it? More importantly, will it for you? What would make you choose KDE over GNOME (or vice versa)? This week we take a brief look at KDE in both its 3.5.x and 4 incarnations, and outline a few rules of thumb on choosing your desktop environment.

Let's take a quick look at KDE's history and underpinnings. KDE was launched in 1996 and is based on the Qt (pronounced "cute") toolkit. (A toolkit is a set of libraries of the things that make up a graphical user interface -- things like windows, buttons and their functions.) But all was not right with the world. Qt, at that time, didn't use a completely free software license. This caused some concern about the legality of linking to Qt libraries, and the Debian distribution even went so far as to remove KDE from their repositories for a time.

Currently, Qt uses a dual license. The toolkit is available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the QPL (Q Public License), and linking to the Qt libraries is no longer an issue.