The first Release Candidate of KDE 4.0 has been released today \o/. The most important and interesting packages are already available from experimental. If you want to try them, point your sources.list to experimental and install kdelibs5 kdepimlibs5 kdebase kdebase-workspace kdebase-runtime extragear-plasma kdegames kdeutils kdegraphics kdeedu. While I write these lines, kdebase-workspace and kdebase-runtime are stuck at NEW, so you can fetch them (actually, all the packages), adding to your sources:

deb http://people.debian.org/~ana/rc1/ ./.

These packages are not co-installable with current KDE 3.5.8, so if you want to test them, do not use your production environment and use instead qemu or virtualbox-ose. Even if the release is named RC1, this is not yet a fully usable desktop, but you have as well the possibility installing KDE4 apps on a your KDE3, i.e. try okular :)

If you are lazy, or not in hurry, you can wait a few days until the Debian KDE4 Beta4 Live is ready!

Finally, please, do not report bugs against KDE4 in the BTS yet, if you find bugs on KDE itself, report them to directly to upstream in the KDE bugzilla, and optionally you can note down it in this wiki page.

The first version of the KDE4 desktop series, KDE 4.0 is planned to be release in December, 11th 2007 and our releases managers are aiming to release Lenny in September. Given that there are some months between releases, this seem to lead a lot of people to think Lenny will be released with KDE4, but this is highly improbable. It is true that KDE 4.0 could be delayed again, and almost everybody is expecting Lenny be delayed... :)

The development of KDE4 started more than 2 years ago, and actually the libraries seems to be in a pretty good shape, the next release of the KDE Development Platform is a proof of that, a lot of stuff that is what the end user actually see, like plasma, needs still some work. A lot of improvements that we are hoping see in our desktop won't be until KDE 4.1 or even 4.2. So the first release of the KDE4 desktop series will be still work in progress in some aspects and not so functional like current KDE 3.5 is.

On the other hand, KDE 3.5 is a pretty mature desktop that has been developed and tested for almost 2 years now, the 8th revision, KDE 3.5.8, was released in the beginning of this week, and we'll likely have a KDE 3.5.9 revision with more bugfixes. Also there are plans to merge the kdepim enterprise branch into the current 3.5 kdepim branch, so we'll be getting soon a bunch of bugfixes in kdepim, that have the dubious honour in being the second KDE module in Debian with more bugs after kdelibs.

So even if KDE 4.0 is released in december and lenny is delayed, there is not enough time to push KDE 4.0 or even 4.1, into a Debian stable release.

Aug 06 Archive Adminis (  20) Processing of kde4libs_3.92.0.dfsg.1-1_i386.changes
Aug 06 Debian Installe (  74) kde4libs_3.92.0.dfsg.1-1_i386.changes is NEW

Finally, the first component of KDE4, kdelibs has been uploaded to experimental. And it is waiting at NEW at this moment. Hopefully, kdepimlibs will be uploaded soon.

About the rest, sorry, I have not idea :)