Debian And KDE 4.2

Firstly Happy New Year to anyone reading this!

Secondly, posts have been few and far between due to real life issues (work). 3 high profile clients all going live at the same time and involving a lot of attention.

So back to the subject of this post. Debian and KDE 4. I know that compiling KDE is always an option. However, there are a lot of people that would like to be running KDE 4 on Debian by choice rather than by compiling. I also know that Debian has it's reasons for not wanting to bring KDE 4 into the fold until Lenny finally makes it out of the door (2010 anyone??). I myself have been running the KDE 4.1 packages from kde4.debian.net/. These packages have been built by the Debian KDE packagers and apart from the complete lack of QT/GTK theming engine and a very odd login screen bug they have been really good and solid. Up until 18 November 2008 they where even getting updates based on the incremental KDE 4.1 release's being made by the KDE team.

However, after a recent blog by one of the Debian KDE packagers I realised that maybe Debian might not be the best choice distro for KDE4. They are only offically supporting the above KDE4.1 packages for Lenny. Therefore, there wil be no "official" or "semi-official" (as in from the Debian KDE maintainers) KDE 4.2 (or later) packages for Lenny. Oh ok that would mean there would be no easy access to KDE 4 later than 4.1 for Lenny which could be the stable Debian release for the next 2 to 3 years.

I know there will be various work arounds and hacks but not everybody wants to have to go to great lengths to run their prefered desktop.

Ana's blog has recently released details of kde42.debian.net/. This is a repositry of KDE 4.2 packages. The build is pre beta 2 and is completly and utterly unsupported. Oh and it is for unstable only which I think also shows their plans for KDE 4 on Lenny.