So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. And then I used KDE 4 some, started Konqueror, browsed about a bit, configured a few things with System Settings, started Kopete and chatted a little.

[image:3123 align=left hspace=20 node=3123]One of the big things about KDE 4 at an app level was moving from KControl to System Settings. The major complaint about KDE (from non-KDE users) is that it is too configurable, where 'too' generally means they can't find the thing they want to configure. System Settings is the product of usability-led design, and kcontrol was dropped some months ago, but it seems very little has happened since it was ported to KDE 4. So rather than just give myself an ulcer about it, I've decided to take System Settings in hand and make it good.

Today and tomorrow are the first openSUSE KDE/GNOME Packaging Days. In all timezones. A truly global event. One of the goals of openSUSE is to get SUSE packages in the care of non-Novell employees, so Dirk Mueller and Michael Wolf have been organising a couple of days where fearless peeps can get on board the openSUSE Build Service with a little help from the pros.

So I'm doing a bit of hacking on Kopete and System Settings tonight and thought I would compile kdemultimedia for the first time in ages and see what KDE4 sounds like. And I'm pleasantly surprised. Sitting here listening to Crystal Castles and some random chiptunes from 8bitpeoples is a suitably retro techy soundtrack for the future of the desktop.

The screenshot is really boring ;). I've been doing some UI rework on Kopete lately, I should find time to blog about it soon...

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As Cornelius blogged, this week the KDE people at SUSE are spending our hard-won innovation time on polishing KDE 4. The vast majority of our new development time is now allotted to KDE 4, so to make sure that our efforts go in the right direction and to coordinate them with the work the rest of the community, we'd like to announce an inaugural openSUSE KDE IRC meeting happening tomorrow, Wednesday 17 October, in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode, at 1800 CEST.

So after 2 days of frantic hacking we made some good progress on Akonadi - including sorting out the database schemas with professional help for performance, producing benchmarking tools to find areas to improve in other layers, fixing MIME parser bugs, improving KMail in KDE 4.0 and KOrganizer's layouting.

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Thanks to KDAB for hosting us, Kris from MySQL for spending his weekend on our database, and KDE e.V. and Novell for their support.

A couple of weeks ago we had the openSUSE hack week and at last it was the newly renamed KDE Team's turn to share our thoughts with the Novell Open Audio team. They're Novell's podcast unit, who travel the empire of the big red N finding what the company and its community are doing, record it then mix it all up with their idiosyncratic wit and what I've come to believe is the Novell rock anthem.

I'd like to inform you all of my tutorial on instant messaging development for Kopete (the KDE instant messenger), at 10.00am (huh?) on aKademy 2007's tutorial day.

Something I read on aaron's blog just now struck a chord with me, and cut through my morning head haze nicely. We are the renaissance geeks. Some of the stuff we do is indescribably technical and abstract, but it all has the end of increasing general utility, that is, by letting people use their computers in ways that grow their happiness and productivity.

With apologies to Public Enemy, but KDE has now got recognition of its usability, in that KDE 3 officially meets ISO 9241. We might not be the best at marketing it, but more and more people are finding out for themselves about KDE's goodness by picking it up themselves.

While I'm skeptical generally of the application of broad certifications and kitemarks to software, it should help us get more users among those large organisations who do need the "boxes to be checked".