You are press.

My previous blogentry caught quite some attention.
Within 36 hours, I burnt 90GB of traffic (thanks jorik for bearing with me!), and at first apache
choked on the number of incoming request. But that was only a configuration problem, apache needed
its maximum number of concurrent connections increased. I blame the web-2.0 buzzword for this.

So most of the users were eager to see screenshots of what’s going to become KDE 4.0, Aaron’s
changed to parts of the plasma user interface (panel and krunner theming were updated shortly
before) probably helped a bit. Right before my blogentry, we released KDE 4.0 rc1, which didn’t
have those new looks, and we didn’t really bother posting screenshots along with the announcement.
So why that? It has everything to do with our current release process. Dirk usually tags the next
release on wednesday, then it gets roughly a week of testing, making compile and fixing obviously
stupid things you inevitably get when snapshotting an source code repository that’s heavily worked
on. So it takes about a week to prepare the release and distribute it to the packagers of various
distributions to give them some time to build the code. The announcement is usually done the week
thereafter on Tuesdays. And in this case, those running KDE trunk have the more recent code when
the release that has been tagged one week before is announced. This will probably change once we
branch 4.0 and trunk/ becomes KDE 4.1-in-progress. This, however, will also still take some time.
It has been shortly discussed in the release team, and most people think that we should not distract
ourselves by branching off 4.1 too quickly.

So you are press. A lot of KDE’s PR comes from people within the community. It’s
quite natural, given the interesting blogposts on PlanetKDE.

We can make it even more popular by reaching out and being more verbose about the cool desktop,
apps and libraries we create.
I gather that KDE is also read by quite some people who might not
be following the traffic on various mailinglists, and it’s always beneficial for us if we know
better what’s going on in other parts of the project. Let’s feel encouraged by the amount of
people eagerly waiting for information to pop up. Create screenshots of cool things in KDE,
explain them shortly and blog it. We can probably also amaze ourselves quite a bit by all those
tricks that can be done with our new KDE — such blogs also make nice additions to the
documentation and might also enlighten those people longing for this handy feature to dump their
proprietary platform and switch to KDE.

My favourite feature this week was the “undo close tab” which konqueror now has. When logging
into my KDE 4 desktop, konqueror friendly asked when starting up if it should also restore the
previously opened tabs. Sure, do it. Works like a charm! :-)

Last week, my favourite feature certainly was Kate’s sessions. It’s not a new thing, but I
never bothered looking at it and considering it. Now, my kate has a couple of sessions that
save me the tedious work of opening 5 documents (that often are located in different
directories). Now it’s two clicks away and I can get to work right away.