At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason.

But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and development that I wanted to do.

It helped me to get the best job of my life.

I’ve been working at VMware for more than 4 years now. I only have this job because I’ve taught myself everything I know about programming languages, and most of that has been through my work in the Open Source communities I’ve participated in over the last 15 years.

Most recently, I’ve had a blast as a KPilot/KDE PIM developer. I’ve met more people from all around the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But KPilot and Palm Pilots in general have long since lost relevance. And sadly, I was never able to find a new itch to scratch and a new area to start contributing to. It’s been years now since I’ve contributed any sizable amount of code to any Open Source community. I’ve waited, hoping that I’d find more time, or that I’d find a new itch to scratch, or that I’d get the urge to start hacking on Linux Desktop stuff again. But it hasn’t happened, and I have no reason to think it’s going to anytime soon.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly irritated and frustrated by the ever-changing-and-not-always-in-good-ways Linux Desktop. I’ve blogged before about this and got quite a bit of feedback about it. That was two years ago, almost exactly. What has changed since then? In my mind, absolutely nothing. Now we have Ubuntu turning the desktop on its head again with Ubuntu Unity and destabilizing applications that have worked perfectly well for years and years. I know this because I’ve been working on VMware’s Workstation and Player products for the Linux Desktop for the last 4 years and I can’t tell you how much time and frustration and energy I’ve had to put into last minute bug fixes to work around new and broken in “exciting ways” behavior in Linux Desktop Environments. That’s the kind of thing that really sucks the life and soul out of you, especially when it’s something that you’ve cared so deeply about for so very long.

You have to understand… I have been one of the most outspoken and zealous of Linux Desktop proponents you’d ever want to meet. And I do believe that the Linux Desktop is awesome and a worthwhile thing to use, if only to keep down on the amount of ongoing upkeep you have to do to your PC thanks to viruses, malware, etc. But I have decided to move away from caring about Desktop Linux and I don’t know if I’ll be back, personally.

I’ve always looked at jwz’s “final straw” rant and thought that I could never get there. I’ve invested too much time and energy in Desktop Linux and cared too much about it to give up on it, right? Well, I was wrong, I guess. =:)

So, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Linux or a slam on KDE or a slam on Open Source or anything else. Just chalk it up to an old, cranky dude who became disillusioned with the Linux Desktop if you want. Or chalk it up to said old, cranky dude finally having enough money to buy a Mac and seeing how beautifully it runs and really enjoying it and not wanting to deal with for Linux Desktop on his personal daily equipment anymore.

But anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. I feel like I’m losing part of who I am by doing it officially and all. But I have been using and developing on Apple’s OS X lately and I’m thoroughly loving it. A couple of months ago, the opportunity presented itself at work and I made the switch from the VMware Linux Workstation/Player team to the VMware Fusion team, and I’m really loving it. I had been feeling like I’ve been stagnating lately and not learning or growing as a developer. I had been wanting to make a change and learn new technology and languages. And thus far, I’m really liking Objective-C and Mac development.

So at this point, I’m going to remove myself from planet KDE and take a break from Linux Desktop for a while. I’ve actually been not blogging for quite a while now because I know it’s not going to be relevant to planet KDE and that’s been another source of frustration, so I’m going to rectify that now too. I’ve been meaning to remove myself from the planet KDE feed for a while now, but 1) I felt like I should say some kind of goodbye and 2) I can’t seem to be able to log in to my svn+ssh account anymore to remove myself from the planet feed. =:/

Anyway, sorry to all my KDE friends. I feel like I’m letting you guys down. But truth be told, I haven’t been doing anything in the last couple of years anyway. =:/ I guess it’s just a normal part of life and different phases of it or something. We’ll see where this road goes. I’m hoping that at the very least, this will let me feel like I can start blogging again. =:)

I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours of KPilot hacking in per year =:( ) KPilot developer, and occasionally even turn some of them on) Palm PDA devices. I have successfully resisted the siren call of the iPhone for the last 2+(?) years–partly because there is no functional synchronization solution between my Linux desktop and it, partly because it’s pretty bloody expensive, partly because Cingular has atrociously high data plans compared to Sprint, partly because I’ve endured the lunacy of FLOSS developers trying to keep re-figuring out Apple’s iPod/iTouch/iPhone database structures that would otherwise allow me to synchronize my music and movies with said Apple devices and have an extremely bad taste in my mouth from said frustrations, and partly because I’m one of the cheapest geeks you’ll ever meet (also, being the sole income-provider for a family of 5 only solidifies my inborn cheap nature). All that being said, however, I hereby declare the good old Palm OS officially dead and uninteresting to me anymore. Okay, truth be told, that was an obvious statement to make 2 years ago, but I’ve been in denial since then and am only now trying to face reality and get help. =;P

I am a gadget geek–I always have been–and I have wasted more money on Palm gadgets than I care to remember. I clearly remember agonizing over spending $400 or so for the Palm IIIc when it came out (but OOH, it had a nice color screen!). And the $400 or so I spent on the Clie NX70v was a week-long ordeal that involved me hemming and hawing and spending many an angst-filled evening at the local Circuit City. And the $400 or so I spent on my Treo 650 (which magically turned into a Treo 700p in a couple of years after the 650 became deathly ill) was also quite the emotional ordeal. And yes, I realize that these series of purchases contradict my statement that I’m a cheap geek, so I’ll defend my previous statement by saying that I’m apparently a selectively cheap geek.

Palm was a GREAT gadget and a good OS that allowed me to sync my data with my Linux desktop and enjoy being cool and geeky. In fact, it was (and still is) the only PDA solution that I have found that synchronizes (for the most part) very smoothly with my  Linux desktop. It was never as flashy as the Windows-based devices, but it sure was more stable. And there were a huge number of applications for the Palm OS. But seeing the spartan Palm OS 5 interface nowadays, especially when compared with the iPhone bling, or even the Maemo interface… it’s like looking at the old OLWM Window Manager compared with the current KDE4 sexiness. There’s just no comparison. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 years (or have been cheap and/or in denial like me and/or just so in love with the old Palm OS), it’s painfully obvious that very few care about the old Palm OS anymore. Everybody and their pet turtle has an iPhone now (or so it surely seems). And being a FLOSS advocate/hacker/supporter/proponent/religious nutjob, that concerns me and I’d like to again put my money where my mouth and soapbox are.

So what’s my point with all of this? Well, it’s time for me to get a new phone/geek toy, I think. I want to be as FLOSS-supportive and interopable as possible, and I’m really curious what other people who are FLOSS-conscious are thinking about this and have done about it. While none of the options that I see are 100% FLOSS-perfect (being that we’re still dealing with proprietary bits/pieces/networks/hardware with cell phone companies), Android seems the closest, while the Palm Pre (assuming it runs on Linux and allows itself to be open enough to be hackable/customizable/extensible) seems a strong second, whilst the “what do you mean you don’t have an iPhone yet” seems a distant third, being that you’re totally under Apple’s friendly-dictatorship-and-heavily-taxed thumb.

Here’s my short list so far, with my take on positives/negatives. I’m very curious to see what people (especially Planet KDE people who are actively working on providing/improving/supporting FLOSS) have done and are thinking with regards to their cell phones.

• The Apple iPhone. The current definition of sexiness–just ask the entire planet. Unfortunately, from my understanding, it’s very tightly controlled by Apple, and while you can jailbreak it, you’re still under Apple’s thumb as far as transferring music/videos (at the very least) to it from a Linux desktop. Want to back it up? You’d better have either a physical Windows or Mac machine or a very good virtual machine provider like VMware Workstation or Player and cross your fingers a lot. The other major downside in my book is that you can only get an iPhone if you use AT&T/Cingular as your cell phone provider, and their data plans are the highest in the industry ($30 per phone–and that’s if you don’t want to be able to connect to it via Bluetooth for laptop internet accesss???). Also, it doesn’t look like they have a shareable family data plan, so I’d be looking at $90 per month, at least, for just data access?? And then there’s the fact that it’s the absolutely least FLOSS-friendly geek toy of the bunch, from my understanding. There are a lot of positives, of course, and there seems to be no shortage of 3rd party application developers and applications. Of course, if you want to develop for the iPhone, don’t you have to pay the Apple tax and buy a physical Apple computer as well??
• Android phones. Really slick and awesome looking! I would LOVE to just have the PIM applications from it be able to run on my Nokia N810 and be able to sync flawlessly with my Google calendar/contacts data! The biggest downside for the Android for me is that only T-Mobile has an Android phone–and I can’t get T-Mobile service in my neck of the woods (literally). I’d really like to leave myself as open as possible to being able to get an Android phone as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking that I’d like to sign up with whichever cell phone service provider will give me the best shot at that. I think that because Google is backing this platform, it has the second-best chance of attracting application developers/hackers and should mean that it’s pretty future-proof from the standpoint of being able to look forward to years ahead of good, solid applications for the Android platform. Is it reasonable to think that even if cell phone companies don’t sell Android phones themselves, that one would be able to pick up an HTC Touch or Diamond or similar and slap the Android OS on it and have a fully functional Android phone?
• And finally, the soon-to-be-released Palm Pre (and here we tie in nicely with the title… the Palm is dead! Long live the Palm!) I cannot find a whole lot of information about the Palm Pre right now, but what little I see looks good. Based on Linux(?), supports a bunch of audio/video codecs out of the box, sports a slick new interface that looks very much like the iPhone/Android UIs, has a built-in GPS, and is being aimed squarely at the iPhone/Blackberry camps. The things that concern me: it has a custom web browser (why didn’t they use one of the existing FLOSS browsers???), lack of information regarding add-on external storage (does it use microSD?), will it support Bluetooth tethering/DUN(?), and the fact that this is yet another new platform that requires a healthy influx of 3rd-party app developers/hackers. Can Palm pull in a huge number of app developers to breathe life into the Pre and its new WebOS? To me, that’s the biggest question, since if they cannot, I don’t think they can stem the tide of iPhone-exclusive applications and developers. On the positive side, my current cell phone provider (Sprint) will be offering the Pre in another week or so, and they have pretty attractive data plans.

So I’d love to get comment feedback from folks about this. What are you currently using if you’re using one of these solutions? What are you planning on doing going forward?

Woohoo! KDE 4.2 is released!! I only wish the last few KPilot bug fixes would have made it into the 4.2.0 release, but we were too late. Still, if you think you knew what KDE4 was all about, think again. Check out KDE 4.2.0. =:)

Howdy all,

I just wanted to get a note out to as wide a distribution list as possible to spread some important news about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release and KPilot’s (exciting!!) part in it. If you don’t care about KDE PIM, data syncing, Palm devices, or KPilot, you may stop reading now and I won’t be offended. =;P

For the last 2 years, the talented Bertjan Broeksema and I have spent our Google Summer of Code months doing some major rework and redesign for KPilot. You can see our sync algorithm redesign Use Case here: http://snurl.com/acftl and some UML sequence and class diagrams that we used here: http://snurl.com/acfwd. Previous to our redesign, each conduit in KPilot contained all of the logic necessary for the syncing of record-based data, as well as the transformation, comparison, and resolution of that data. This means that each conduit did things its own way. We didn’t share any code between the conduits for syncing, and we weren’t consistent about how the data was synced. In addition, NONE of our conduits had the ability to synchronize category information from PC to Palm. We had inconsistent smatterings of success going from Palm to PC, but again, we were inconsistent and buggy. And obviously with this duplication of work, whenever a bug popped up in one conduit, it likely existed and had to be fixed (and most probably did not get fixed) in the other conduits. In addition, we did a very poor job of ensuring that we didn’t lose our users’ data, and subsequently, we had a bunch of “KPilot ate my future” e-mails (http://snurl.com/acgf0) that nobody was happy about.

So one of our most important goals in our KPilot redesign was the safety of our users’ data. We now go to great lengths at the beginning and end of the sync process to make sure that our record counts match between Palm and PC, and that we’re able to save all of our data successfully. If anything breaks in the process, we do not commit or save our changes to the Palm and PC sides.

We also didn’t want to keep writing and maintaining “how to sync” logic in our conduits anymore. This was a major design flaw previously and led to a lot of rework and problems. So we designed a record-based (since all of our syncing is from record-based sources) syncing conduit set of base classes that all of our new conduits inherit from. This means that now all of our conduits use the same syncing logic and flow. If we got it wrong, we fix it and now all of our conduits are fixed. If we need to improve the performance and efficiency (which we do, still), we fix it in one place and now it’s fixed and improved in all of our conduits. This is a much cleaner design and it means that our implementing conduit classes are now MUCH simpler, have MUCH less code in them, are MUCH easier to understand, and all follow the same patterns, meaning the learning curve for debugging, writing and contributing conduit code just became darned near close to flat. The job of our conduits is reduced to data transformation, comparison, and record domain knowledge, as it should be. The syncing logic all happens in the base classes.

Another nice feature that we added, although it’s not completely finished, is a final “volatility” check in the base conduit classes. At the end of the sync, we look at how many records we have created/updated/deleted in comparison to starting and ending counts, and if the changes are too volatile, we’ll ask our users whether they want us to save the sync or undo it.

Anyone familiar with programming in professional environments should be familiar with the idea of commit and rollback. Well, previous to KDE 4.2′s KPilot, we had one mode: change live data on the fly and don’t bother with commit/rollback. This made things nice and fast, to be sure, but we also lost a lot of data that we shouldn’t have. In fact, we didn’t even have a way to not lose data, previously. So this was another important design decision we made in the new version of KPilot. We do all of our syncing work in temporary storage and only at the end of a successful sync process do we commit (or rollback) our changes to the real (PC and Handheld) data stores.

We also have a nice new Keyring (http://gnukeyring.sourceforge.net/) conduit for KPilot which uses our new base syncing classes.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to finish polishing it off, and thus it will most likely be disabled for the final KDE 4.2 release. We’d love your help in getting it finished, though. Bertjan has even written a nice Qt4-based PC Keyring data file viewer/editor that we’d love to get finished, polished, and released. Please help!

So there’s a LOT of coolness in the upcoming KDE 4.2 version of KPilot. Not to mention the fact that it’s the first KDE4 version of KPilot. But I also want to set realistic expectations so that we’re all on the same level.

This will be the first release of a major rewrite of KPilot, and we have had very little user feedback thus far (although there have been a few very helpful folks and I really appreciate them!!!). This means that there are guaranteed to be as-yet-undiscovered bugs. I have been doing a bunch of testing and bug fixing, even since the last RC1 release of KDE 4.2, but there’s just no way I can hit all of the use cases we have. Things are looking extremely smooth and stable and I have not once lost data (yay!), but I’m sure bugs are in there, so make sure you make and keep a good backup of your Palm and PC data before trying new software.

Previous to KDE 4.2, KPilot relied on the external data sources to know about the condition of that data source’s records and PC->Palm  mappings, etc. With KDE 4.2, KPilot now keeps this information itself. This is a good thing! We had a bunch of problems in KDE3 which were caused by the mapping being wrong and/or the state being wrong (X-PILOTID and X-PILOTSTAT).  So we have our own XML-based mapping files now that are kept in $KDEDIR/apps/kpilot/conduits/<

I also did some more sync testing with KPilot today and am quite pleased with the results. Thanks to Bertjan’s excellent GSOC work from the last 2 years, we have a really solid syncing solution, and my confidence in it is only growing stronger, the more testing that I do.

So, with this little memento, and a renewed resolve to not be jealous of all the Camp KDE folks enjoying Jamaica whilst I spent 3 hours, shoveling snow today, I now turn in for the night.

Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of  Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be a webcam of me?!?), I don’t get many opportunities to feel a part of my team and get the kind of feedback that you normally get in a job by seeing how people react to you just by being around them. But anyway, it was a WHOLE lot of fun. I had never heard of, much less played, Tetrinet before yesterday, and I got my butt kicked soundly. But the camaraderie and laughter and fun was exactly what I needed.

On Tuesday, I got to spend the whole day in my dining room with a friend and co-worker from VMware and got some really cool Linux work done. It was actually some really sweet stuff that he did earlier in the year as part of his internship, but part of it got backed out due to Windows build issues. We worked through all of the issues (and found a couple of problems in GlibMM along the way) and he brought me up to speed with the features and implementation details and we did a pretty good job at documenting it all to boot. I can’t say exactly what it is, just yet, but if you’re a fan of VMware’s Unity mode (guest VM windows showing up inside your host, like normal windows instead of being contained inside the guest OS window), this work will make things just that much cooler. I’m working on Unity stuff for our next Workstation and Player releases and I’m hoping we get to include this coolness!

I’ve been using the Logitech VX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse for a couple of years now and it is extremely cool. The neatest thing about it (other than the fact that it works perfectly in Linux and has a gazillion buttons, and the little storage compartment inside the mouse for the USB dongle) is the scroll wheel. They call it a “hyper-fast scroll wheel” and it is just that–you give it a good flick and it keeps going and going and going… awesome fun and really useful for long documents/web pages. But last week, I saw the Logitech Optical Marble Mouse and after reading all the reviews and talking to a friend who had 5 of them and loved them, I decided to give it a try, and I absolutely love it. It has the same kind of scrolling awesomeness as the VX Revolution wherein you flick it with your fingers and it keeps going much longer than a normal mouse wheel (albeit not nearly as long as the VX), but it also keeps your hand stationary to help prevent or improve RSI problems. It took just a few hours to get used to it after having used a normal rodent for decades, and it is now my favorite mouse. But it does take a little bit of configuring…

Silly me, but I am so used to having to hack things to do my bidding in Linux that I wasted a bunch of hours researching how to get the Marble Mouse to do horizontal and vertical scrolling. You see, the mouse only has 4 buttons, and no scroll wheel, so you use X’s EmulateWheel option and then tell it which mouse button to use (EmulateWheelButton) so that when you hold that button down and move your mouse, instead of moving the mouse cursor, it scrolls in that direction. REALLY cool! It seems, however, that the particulars of how to configure this mouse in X changes with each vesion of X, or at least between distributions. BUT, if you’re using OpenSUSE 11.1 as I am, just use YaST and change one of your mouse definitions to be the “Logitech TrackMan Marble FX (PS/2)” (even though you’re connecting it through USB), and you’ll find that it works beautifully (DOH! Should have tried that first!!!). I set my EmulateWheelButton to “8″, which is the little button on the left side of the mouse. I’m LOVING it! BTW, if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid, there’s a drastically different way to get this working involving either HAL fdi files or a simple xinput script. Anyway, if you find yourself using this mouse and getting stuck on how to get it to scroll, add a comment to this post and I’ll provide more details.

I also got a chance to spend some time on Ye Olde KPilot this week, which felt really good. Truth be told, it’s darned necessary and scary, since KDE 4.2 is nearing release any day now. But I fixed a bunch of KPilot issues (layout, configure dialog, crashes, sync problems) and even got KPilot to successfully sync my calendar and contacts once. I need to spend some more time this weekend in trying out different sync scenarios to make sure we’re rock solid before the release, but the good news is that contrary to previous versions of KPilot, we’ve tried extra-special-hard to not lose your data. You may find that (right now), we err on the side of giving you  more data than less, meaning possible duplicates until we get those bugs fixed. So, right now would be a really good time for all you KPilot users (both of them?) to come on out and help us test KPilot. We have about a week to find and fix any problems. =:/ Oh, and I also went through the open Ubuntu KPilot bugs and triaged them a bit too, which felt good.

Along those lines, I actually did get a chance to talk to a couple of KPilot users this week (both of them, I think!!) and look through some problems they were having. I spent a large chunk of time looking into a bizarre problem a Kubuntu KPilot user was having from the Kubuntu 4.2 beta2 packages. Along the way, I learned how to find the kde_plugin_version in one of our .so’s (“gdb foo.so” and then “p kde_plugin_version”), and I added some debugging that should have been there all along anyway in KPilot, so it’s not all bad. But it turns out that the Ubuntu KPilot package is missing libkpilot_akonadibase.so, and so none of the new conduits work. I’ve discussed things with Jonathon Thomas on the Ubuntu bug page and this should be fixed for the next Ubuntu KPilot packages.

Before I started testing KPilot, though, I needed to get my PIM data in order. I’ve been meaning to put my contacts and calendar into Google for a while now, and this was the perfect time to do that. So I found this neat LifeHacker page about using Dropbox and KeePass for synchronizing all your private and important information, and cleaned up my contact information and put everything that could be considered sensitive or important into KeePassX, which is REALLY nice, and I highly recommend it. Excellent functionality, good strong encryption, and a beautiful Qt4 GUI to boot. I’ve not looked into using Dropbox yet, but that’s just an added benefit. After that, it was a simple matter of wasting 3 hours trying to format my kaddressbook-exported-to-csv file into something that Google likes, pulling my hair out, finally giving up in frustration, saving my std.vcf file to a shared drive, opening it up with OS X, importing it into the Mac address book, and then using A to G to create a CSV file and then importing that into Gmail’s contacts. *sigh* What a pain in the butt!! Someone seriously needs to write a Python script for this or something. Honestly.

I also discovered, much to my chagrin, that Firefox and Konqueror both consume ungodly amounts of memory with a 16-meg web page (to the point of exhausting all of my real and virtual memory and crashing X), like the error page I was getting from our internal sandbox compile machine, but Opera handles it beautifully. So I’m using Opera again, quite happily. Oh, and since Google now allows you to customize your Gmail keybindings, I can finally get around the annoyance of “#” not working for “delete”!! I’ve set up “d” for “delete” and now my Opera/Gmail experience is glorious again. Now, if we could just get THEMES in Google Apps For Your Domain, that would be AWESOME!

And in closing, the latest Street Fighter IV videos from shoryuken.com look amazing! I’m going to have to go to GameStop today and plunk down my pre-order money.

I can just feel the momentum behind us, can’t you?

If this were a corporation, right about now, you’d expect to see some old dude get up in front of everybody, work himself into a frenzy, run around on stage (“developers, developers, developers”?), and try to get everybody motivated to keep pushing hard at making our software the most awesomest, bestest, most stablest thing you could ever want.

But we’re not a corporation (thank God!!).

And we don’t have an old, sweaty, balding dude to put up on stage and try to whip everybody into being motivated (also, thank God!).

We just have us. And that is the magic of Open Source. It is up to us to keep our momentum going, to not give up, to keep pushing ourselves harder, to keep improving our software stack, to keep squashing bugs, to try to have the best desktop environment possible.

So keep up the awesome work, everybody. You’re doing it right!! =:)

Anyway, I digress…

As this year’s Google Summer of Code winds down to an abrupt end (Pencils down on Monday?? Already??), I am once again very satisfied and impressed with the job that Bertjan has done. He’s continued last year’s outstanding job with our base synchronization conduit and made it even better. He’s finally brought category synchronization into KPilot (how have people not been complaining about this??), thanks to our outstanding base conduit foundation. And he’s ported the ToDo, Contacts, and Calendar conduits to the new Akonadi back end! Woot! I just tried syncing contacts and calendar changes and am very happy to announce that they did sync successfully into Akonadi–even the categories! Woot, again! Job very well done, Bertjan! =:)

Now, is KPilot perfect and ready for release with KDE 4.2? No, not just yet. But it is miles ahead of where it was before the start of this year’s GSOC–and that’s exactly what we were aiming to accomplish. And, even better, I believe that it’s very possible to iron out the rough spots in time for 4.2, thanks to Bertjan’s work, which really excites me.

Please take a moment, if you use KPIlot, to encourage and thank Bertjan on his hard work this year. =:)

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt.

I am finally getting excited about our PIM space again, and that feels really, really good. KMail, KOrganizer, KPilot, and the rest of our PIM suite was what drew me to KDE in the 3.x series. (Well, that and quite honestly I find the intentional dumbing-down and lack of configurability of the other large, free DE irritating to the point of exhaustion.) But lately our PIM apps have suffered from lack of care and have started to look seriously unsexy compared with Thunderbird, Sunbird, and even *gasp* Evolution. But KDE4 gives us a chance to remedy that, in my mind, and looking at this year’s Summer of Code projects, I’m hoping we get some really nice improvements done. There’s a few really sweet ones that I’d love to see get accomplished: the Google Contacts/Calendar integration into Akonadi and thusly KDE PIM, the enhanced KMail view, and (nearest and dearest to my heart) getting KPilot fully functional, and rock solid for KDE4.

And going through the SOC-sorting meeting made me realize all over again how fantastic a community it is that we have in KDE. There’s a lot of respect and comaradarie and friendliness that I just don’t see in some other communities. Not to mention the quality of talented people that we have. PIM might have drawn me to KDE, but it’s the people and our awesome community that we have that has kept me. =:)

Anyway, I just had to say that it feels really, really good to be excited about KDE4 again. In my mind, it’s a really unique opportunity to do something fresh and new and fun and exciting again. It’s a chance to learn from past mistakes and do better. It’s a chance to take the fantastic functionality that we have and rethink how our users can best interact with it. It’s a chance to not be bound to the past and to not have to be stuck with the same old presentation layer we have just because we don’t want to make drastic changes to our applications.

As the pretty graphic says, KDE4 is truly a chance to be free. =:)