I’d love to say I hated KDE, for only one reason though, its File-Manager plus browser combo called Konqueror.

Now everything seems to have changed! KDE4 will have new Seperate file manager called Dolphin.

KDE4 is scheduled to be released in October 2007 and will have a lot of updates from the current release. It will be using QT4, which according to many sources will increase the desktop performance by 20-30%.

aRts will be kicked and be replaced by Phonon Framework, which will enable developers to easily code applications to use backends like XINE, GStreamer easily.

On the visual front, the new default icon set will be called Oxygen, which look quite neat and are easy on the eyes. Then there is a new combined desktop and panel interface called Plasma, which also has neat support for widgets!

Not to be forgotten is that QT4 has good support for Windows and Mac, so we can hope there will be a port of KDE for Windows!

Everything seems interesting as of now, lets wait and watch when the Betas are released.