KDE on Windows is Really Shaping Up

When it comes to a Windows desktop, you pretty much know what to expect. The basic Explorer shell has been around as long as Windows, and since Windows 95, it really hasn’t changed too drastically. On the Linux side, though, it’s typical to see various desktop environments, not just one. With Ubuntu, GNOME seems to be the popular choice, while with distros like OpenSUSE, KDE is what comes pre-installed.

For Windows users who want to spice things up, there is actually quite a bit of choice available in way of new shells, but what if you happen to like KDE on Linux, but don’t actually want to use Linux? Believe it or not, you can, right now, download and install the upcoming KDE 4.2 release on your Windows desktop, and what it will avail you is a pretty robust layer over top your regular Explorer shell. It doesn’t look identical to its Linux counterpart, but it comes quite close.

Ars Technica has taken the latest release for a spin, and for the most part, they’re pretty impressed. There seems to be a lot of customization capabilities here, although some aspects will still need to be configured by hand. Most applications work just fine under Windows though, although a select few run a little sluggish. Still, the development on this project over the past year has definitely produced some notable gains, and I can’t wait until it’s actually considered a stable product. It’s nice to have choice, regardless of what OS you’re running.

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.