A fly by view of KDE 3.5

Recently, the KDE team released the latest stable version of their flagship product KDE desktop for Linux and other Unices. And within a short time, the good samaritans at Ubuntu (or should I say Kubuntu) made available the packages for KDE 3.5 in their repository with the instructions on how to upgrade all the packages on your machine to mirror those of KDE 3.5 provided you were using Breezy Badger v5.10.

The upgrade to KDE 3.5 was a simple affair consisting of a few steps:

1. Add the digitally signed key to your machine.

   $ wget http://people.ubuntu.com/
            ~jriddell/kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
   $ sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg

2. Include the kubuntu repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list .

   # FILE: /etc/apt/sources.list
   ...
   deb  http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde35 breezy main

3. Update your local database

   $ sudo apt-get update

4. Lastly do a distribution upgrade

   $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Over 130 MB of packages were downloaded from the repository after which the whole system was upgraded to use KDE 3.5.

KDE 3.5 has many marked improvements over its older sibling (3.4). Some of it like storage media notification for the user to realise and many of it under the hood.

Jure Repinc has written a wonderful review of the improvements that one can find in the new KDE 3.5 . His review is an ongoing series of which part 1 and part 2 has been released. Reading the review gives a user a good idea of what to expect from the new version of this ever popular desktop.

But this is just the beginning. KDE 4.0 the next major release is expected to be even more fantastic with respect to usability and eye candy. And we can wait with our fingers crossed till the release of KDE 4.0 next year.