The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

KDE was developed to give Unix applications a common look and feel. From 1996 to 2007 the desktop environment saw many improvements and changes. In January 2008 a rewrite of the entire desktop environment and many of it's core applications was performed. The rewrite, called KDE 4, led to a dramatic change in KDE's stance. Once noted for its configurablity, KDE 4 had significantly fewer options than previous KDE versions. Core applications and the desktop environment itself were missing critical features. Crashes were common. One year later KDE 4.2 was introduced, promising to address all these issues. Additionally, several innovative technologies were introduced then. In this talk we will examine KDE 4.4 and concentrate on one innovative feature (the Good), one questionable design decision (the Bad), and one critical bug (the Broken).