In my KDE 3.5 post, I mentioned it was the final release of KDE before KDE 4. According to this interview on O’Reilly with a KDE developer, there are some BIG changes a’ comin’! It looks like KDE will be going through some paradigm shifts in the way they think about the desktop. Interestingly enough, it is tentatively slated to come out in Fall of 2006, around the time that Windows Vista with IT’S paradigm shift in desktop philosophy should be coming out. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Both KDE and MS seem to be moving towards Apple’s chic desktop concepts.

KDE 3.5 is the last KDE release before KDE 4. As you will know if you are into the Linux world, most projects reserve a major number change for possible imcompabilities. It’s part of the reason why Gnome is no longer following math and is at release 2.13, which is larger than 2.9. When Gnome finally switches to 3, it’s open season for breaking compatibility with all the GTK+ apps that work with the past few years of Gnome. It’s a chance for programmers to say, “Hey, when I made function foo, I had to use a hack to make it work with the Gnome 2.0 series. Now, I can rewrite the Gnome libraries to make it work with proper programming techniques so it works right.” The same will happen with KDE 4, which is having a rewrite of many of the core libraries.