KDE 4 Specifications

KDE 4 Goals: Here is a link to KDE's wiki stating the goals for KDE. Much of the information on this page will be a summary of the features and my own views.

-Qt 4.2 based
-integrate Kicker,KDesktop, and SuperKaramba into one streamlined application ,Plasma (see Below)
-new multimedia interface (Phonon) : include backends for GStreamer, NMM, Helix, and xine : w/ better integration with exhisting solutions for multimedia

From my understanding solid, phonon, and plasma will be operating system independant.

"Solid is an attempt to fix the architecture of the desktop and remove current limitations. In particular, rather than hacking together new implementations in each application, or making applications dependent upon platform-specific technologies like HAL (which currently only works on Linux), Solid will hopefully allow developers to get on with their application's functionality."

"Phonon wants to fill in the gap and provide a multimedia API for KDE developers while at the same time giving the users more choices. With Phonon applications don't need to develop sound engines as Phonon provides them for free. Applications are written saying what they want and not how they want to do it. This leaves some room for the user/administrator to customize things."

Plasma has an idea for a unified desktop/panel interface. You can read about this by clicking "The Vision" on their main webpage. Plasma's goal is to create a aesthetically pleasing desktop experience with applets much like the ones planned for Windows Vista and deployed in OSX. The implementation will take advantage of composite features in newer versions of X11 as opposed to old hack ways of creating a similar experience. This will produce a vary clean and stable base for applets to be built from.