Josef Assad

Edit: This post was written in jest, don't take it too seriously. This being the only serious bit, I'll add the disclaimer that having been around the free software block for a while, I do acknowledge the effort put into KDE. Besides, no one seems willing to have vim/emacs flamewars anymore. :( Oh yeah, just to pre-empt any tensions, I'm no gnome user either (fluxbox, fwiw).

KDE 5 in corporate liveryFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE[1]

The KDE community is flabbergasted to announce that KDE 5.0 has been set upon the unsuspecting free software community.

Widely regarded as the beginning of a new era for desktop computing, this release marks the fulfillment of a certain indeterminate proportion of anticipated features in a manner sacrificing unnecessary ambition for historic and unprecedented levels of realistic development and release scheduling.

The KDE libraries have been rewritten over again, and the development team is proud to have done so more times now than Italy has had governments since World War II. There have been major improvements in all areas, and all other areas than that have witnessed significant improvement though end users may not see much difference for a few years yet while userspace applications trickle out which have been written to take advantage of the new and improved APIs, just as soon as the KDE API documentation team gets back from the Beatles Reunion tour and crunches to meet the revised release schedule.

The KDE 5 desktop has been transformed into a showcase of open source innovation and a clear milestone in the battle to one-up Clive Sinclair for the crown of Most Gizmos of Dubious Utility. A new panel has been developed which features buttons, clickable elements, tactile areas, hotspots, user-responsive icons, and buttons all which completely revolutionize the way clicking around to find applications is done. It's a totally new paradigm, and we have the youtube videos with the enthusiastic narrative to establish reasonable claim to the re-invention of the clickable button.

KDE 5 out of the box desktop personaKDE applications have all been rewritten and are all ready for launch with the KDE 5 desktop, for small values of "all". For those few critical KDE apps which have not yet been completely ported to KDE 5, a compatibility layer is provided consisting of a software emulated KDE 3 and 4 desktop under which non-ported apps will run (for extremely large values of "few"). The flagship KDE 5 application looKatpiKtures promises to transform the once simple activity of displaying images, making full use of idle connectivity and computing resources[2].

All KDE 5 artwork has been successfully transitioned to raster image format, doing away with the constraints of vector-based graphics. bringing the KDE 5 desktop leaps and bounds ahead of competing desktop environments and operating systems such as inkscape and freeciv[3].

The KDE artwork team has spent literally hours on enhancing the visual appeal of KDE 5; new and exciting shades of blue have been blended ever more seductively into slightly different shades of blue which the artwork team insists has a different name and completely different visual impact. It is more than a facelift, it is a botox shot in the rear for a desktop which has already won many design awards, including KDE 5 Beta Testers' Choice, 9/10 by the libqt Developers Journal, 5 stars by _jaxter332_ on IRC, and high praise from the Washington Post[4].

A New Roadmap Architecture

For the new release, a re-engineered roadmap has also been unveiled which plots the release cycle up to KDE 49 (which is tentatively scheduled to coincide with the 2012 London Olympics, which will also host aKademy as part of the sKeet shooting competition). The new roadmap introduces the milestone classifications of:

• Alpha: which marks the start of development, at approximately nine in the morning before any actual work has been done on anything
• Beta: Alpha, only after coffee and with some ideas released in mockup form in .NET code (for speed of feedback turnaround). Beta releases are not expected to go very far.
• Release candidates: Builds of the previous major KDE release with just enough mockups to flood the digg.com front page with screenshots and wild hype
• Launch candidates: Like release candidates, but the blue wallpaper has been replaced by another blue wallpaper that someone from planet KDE was really proud of and which got over fifteen comments
• Final release: An approximation of what people appeared to think the release was supposed to contain, with a blog blitz of exhortations to port previous major version KDE apps to the new binary interface
• Post-release bug fixing: Correcting roadmap misconceptions which created false expectations that the current KDE release was really expected to be usable. This, and shifting features from the roadmap of the current release to the next to preserve innovation and keep material for press releases.

The KDE community wishes the KDE community maximum satisfaction, joy, and fulfilled expectations using this latest and greatest release (while reserving the right to alter the definition of "fulfilled expectations" at any time and without prior or subsequent notice).

[1] "Immediate" in this context may be interpreted at will to mean anything between last week (as with digg.com) and next few years (to suit the Debian stable development cycle)
[2] The new KDE 5 idle resources algorithm is light and fast, calculating only the resources not occupied by processes using the KDE 5 libraries. System overhead is unnoticable on hardware purchased as far back as last Monday. And not running any applications not approved by the KDE board.
[3] Look! A wookie!
[4] As forecasted by the lady who reads palms in the McDonald's in Freiburg.