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Hands on: testing the KDE 4.2 release candidate on Windows

After the official release of KDE 4 last year, I took a close look at nascent projects that aimed to port the desktop environment to other operating systems. These ports have matured significantly over the past twelve months and are beginning to approach the point where they are robust enough for general use.

The open source KDE desktop environment, which is one of the two most popular Linux desktop stacks, underwent a significant transformation during the transition to version 4. Many parts of the environment were written from scratch and large parts of the underlying development infrastructure were overhauled. One of the major changes that accompanied this transition was the adoption of Qt 4, the next major version of KDE's underlying toolkit. Qt licensing changes that coincided with the launch of Qt 4 made it possible for the KDE developers to port the desktop to Windows and Mac OS X. The porting effort was also greatly simplified by KDE's adoption of the CMake build system.

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