This month the KDE Community announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

KDE4 has a lot of hype. It is a significant change, reportedly a big jump forward. There is a lot of new technology and names: Plasma, Oxygen, Phonon, Okular, Solid and more . Depending on what you read, and where you read it, it is either the second coming of the DE Christ, or the first coming of the DE Anti-christ.

My 71 year-old father has agreed to try Ubuntu on his home PC. He has used Windows for years, but after his XP system became so infected with viruses and other malware that I needed to wipe his system, he's willing to try Linux. I've promised I'll reload XP if this experiment fails.

An education supplies company has announced a portable science education computer that runs embedded Debian Linux. Pasco says it designed its sensor-equipped Spark Science Learning System for collaborative science experiments by students, for example measuring conductivity or tracking temperature changes.

I have a passion for photography and have become heavily entrenched in the tools available on Mac OS X, such as Aperture and Photoshop. This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is an open-source operating system which aims for ease of use. The BBC's George Wright and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon offered to install the OS on a laptop for Ashley to take home and experiment with.

a few projects that you might have heard of got their start (in Berlin): Oxygen, Marble and Plasma to name three. Some usability innovations, such as solutions for the select-with-single-click-activation dilemma, also emerged during that meeting.

With KDE 4, we will get Okular, the one stop shop for all our Documents. Okular supports the following document types: PDFPostscriptDjVuCHMtiffimagesdvixpsoooFictionBookComicBookPlucker. Okular began as a replacement of KPDF and was part of Google Summer of code, the project description is at KDE Developer's Corner.

As most of you already know, Dolphin is the new KDE 4 default file manager. The KDE 3 version introduced a new way for file management on KDE. It introduced, for the first time in KDE world, a simple KDE file manager, easy to follow and use. Let's see how Dolphin looks, and how it's an improvement of file management.