As you can see by the rather large list of bugfixes and new features, this has been an eventful week. KDE developers are gathered at the aKademy for conferences, talks, hacking sessions, socializing and commiseration afterwards. These meets allow for decisions to be made, future directions to be decided. No doubt announcements will be made in the coming weeks, but watching the code commits gives a hint of what is to come.

There is a general consensus among KDE developers that aRts sucks. It is unmaintained and possibly unmaintainable. So what multimedia backend should KDE support? GStreamer? NMM? MAS? All three were discussed last weekend at aKademy (video and audio archives here). Each has advantages and disadvantages. Which framework should KDE use? In the best tradition of, well, everything, the best choice iswhen one can avoid a decision. So developers started building a backend called kdemm which is described by Matthias Kretz as "A common interface to multimedia functions that are implemented in exchangeable backends".

We are all curious about the next version of KDE. Will it be 4.0, meaning based on QT 4, in other words sometime towards the end of next year? Or will another 3 point release? Here is the 3.4 feature plan which so far is simply all the unfinished 3.3 stuff moved forward. No doubt there will be more news on this front in the near future.

Waldo Bastian announced version 0.8 of the KIOSK Admin Tool. Here is the changelog: