Boo’s made his final touches and Exploder’s happy with releasing the latest ISO. Expect a stable release of Daryna KDE CE in the days to come.

Linux Mint 5 Elyssa will come with new themes. Here are two of the themes which will be included: WildMint and Lightning.

There are no plans to change the default theme so far so it should look exactly like in Daryna (It was renamed LM4 in the theme manager). If you’re into artwork you probably noticed these two themes are using Aurora (the engine used in the latest Fedora release). We’ll also have a bit of Murrine and a few extra engines available from the customization tab.

According to the Mint Connection blog, 11% of Mint users run the KDE Community Edition.

If you’re a KDE fan you probably feel left out as there certainly isn’t 11% of our news coverage or focus in general covering your favorite edition.

Also, considering KDE is (arguably but generally admitted) the most popular Linux desktop, 11% seems quite low.

If you’ve been running Linux Mint KDE CE you know this has nothing to do with its quality. Jamie “Boo” Birse is doing a marvelous job and although feedback is excellent when it comes to this edition it’s definitely not attracting users out of the Linux Mint community.

So what’s wrong with KDE CE? Well.. to make a long story short: it’s a CE and it should be more than that.

KDE fans probably prefer to run a distribution which proved a strong focus and dedication to KDE. We’re probably seen as a Gnome distribution. The KDE CE isn’t released as frequently or as fast as the Main edition. The blog doesn’t cover it very much. The user guide only covers the Main Edition. Information in the wiki is more or less targeted at the Main Edition… etc etc..

But one man decided to stand up and put a stop of this.. ok maybe I’m overdoing this a little…. Anyway, one man decided to invest himself into changing that. That man is Jaxon aka Akshunj. After talking to Boo we decided to welcome him in the team and see where to go from there.

The first thing we did was to give both Boo and Akshunj access to this blog as authors so that they could keep people updated as to how the KDE CE is doing. Get ready for more news on KDE CE as Boo and Ashkunj will be here to tell you what happens.

The second thing will be a reorganization of the Wiki. Basically as a KDE user you should be able to access some new “KDE part of the Wiki” directly from the main page and browse articles related to KDE-only.

The third thing will be a User Guide for the KDE CE. Now, for this, we rely on the Community. Neither Boo nor I have the time to guarantee this will be done. Ashkunj shall organize this work and see if people are interested in doing this from the forums.

The fourth thing is to develop QT programming in three areas: 1. KDE frontends for Mint tools, 2. KDE equivalents for eventual Gnome-specific mint tools, 3. QT development for new tools for which there is no need under Gnome. Again, the team is not planning to achieve this itself so we’ll rely on the community for this.

Now KDE CE will remain a CE but if you followed the recent development related to Firefox and the money generated by Mint you probably know we’re in the process of creating a company and generating more income. This directly translates into more development time. With Mint 5 being a long term support release we have the opportunity to make Mint KDE competitive among other KDE distros. The edition itself is already very good, all we need is to give it more focus and this is what we want to do.

As for the stable release of Daryna KDE CE, the ISO was uploaded by Boo a few days ago and is being tested at the moment by Exploder and myself. If you’re a Mint KDE fan you’re going to enjoy what’s coming up.

Of course we’re not big enough yet to guarantee the same attention to KDE as we give to the Main Edition, so don’t expect the same level of support/focus, but if we could start by making this CE a real alternative for KDE users, one which is actively maintained, covered, developped and documented then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t get more attention.  You should definitely see improvements in the coming weeks and if this is not the case don’t hesitate to remind us about this blog post 🙂

Clem.