• KDE is us, the people who develop, translate, beautify, explain and promote the software
• KDE’s products include the workspaces Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook, many KDE applications and the KDE Platform on which applications can be built
• KDE Software Compilation is not a brand, but just a name for the stuff that we release simultaneously. It’s unlikely that anyone uses the whole software compilation and probably no one only uses the software compilation – even most distros don’t install the whole thing by default and all include other software too (I don’t use the software compilation, but I do use KDE software)

Brands take time to grow, to become valuable and can take even longer to change. The oft-quoted example we use as a bit of an analog for the KDE brand repositioning is Mozilla/Mozilla Suite/Firefox. In the Mozilla example, the organisation and product effectively shared a name, ‘Mozilla’ (everyone I knew called the app ‘Mozilla’ rather than ‘Mozilla Suite’) and successfully repositioned this to be an organisation ‘Mozilla’ that produces the app ‘Firefox’, among others. Of course, it was slightly easier for them as Firefox was more or less a new product. You can see the effects of this in KDE software too in the way that ‘Plasma Netbook’ has apparently gained more traction than ‘Plasma Desktop’ – a Google search for “Plasma Netbook” produces almost three times as many results as “Plasma Desktop” – because there isn’t an established alternative name for Plasma Netbook.

However, while Mozilla is interesting, another example that perhaps has more relevance (since it relates essentially to repositioning an existing product) is the rebranding of the old SUSE as ‘openSUSE’. I’ve had the feeling that the ‘openSUSE’ guys are making this stick now and Google Trends (yes, I know: this is not a reliable metric of anything except Google searches) seems to indicate that ‘openSUSE’ is now reaching at least parity with ‘SUSE’. If you consider that Novell still uses ‘SUSE’ brands for its enterprise offerings then you might conclude that ‘openSUSE’ has now succeeded in becoming the accepted as well as the correct name for Novell’s community distribution.

SUSE v openSUSE (from Google Trends)

The other thing to note is that these things take time. It has taken ‘openSUSE’ about 5 years to get to a point of apparent parity with ‘SUSE’. I think we all realised at the promo meeting where the brands were finally agreed that this would be a long process of several years. Another issue is that ‘openSUSE’ still seems to lag in news. This may be partly due to news reporting of the corporate ‘SUSE’ products but also due to the conservatism of news sites: they tend not to lead their readers but rather to follow and so are reluctant to adopt new terms until their readers accept them. However, new users learn how to call things partly by reading respected news sites, but also from other authoritative sources such as their package distributors and, well, those of you who blog on Planet KDE We are working with distros so that they can use the correct brands to describe KDE software that they distribute (Troy ran a session at Akademy) and Aaron is trying very hard to be good too. How about you?

It will take time, work and determination. Personally, if the brand structure has stuck by the time KDE starts releasing software based on Platform 5 – by which I mean the news sites talk about Plasma Desktop 5.0 and the like – then I’ll be one happy gearhead.

New KDE website

There are plenty of goodies in this new release (see the feature guide for a more complete run down). However, one of the most exciting new features is the Plasma Netbook workspace. Almost makes me want to get a netbook, but I suspect I’ll give it a run out on my old but little laptop anyway.

In the KDE Platform there are all kinds of exciting changes that have a direct impact on the workspaces. You can now share Plasma widgets remotely, handy if you’d like to share info between your machines (a simple universal todo list perhaps?) and there’s more social web integration thanks to the new GetNewStuff interfaces built on OpenDesktop.org‘s open collaboration services that also allows you to find other KDE software users and search online help.

KDE Plasma Netbook

Heroes of SC 4.4

So, enough of what we’ve done. When you read through the feature guide you’ll see the names of a whole load of people who helped make this release (and there are hundreds more who made contributions, big or small). But there are also some people you won’t read about in there at all.

Is there are party near you?

Then there is the promotion team who have put together the release announcement (kudos to Sebas and Jos I believe). Even more impressive there is the comprehensive feature guide which saw over 2700 revisions by 26 contributors (Jos was all over that, Luca, Justin, Aron Asor, Sebas, Vivek Prakash, Ricky Laishram and Carl Symons all made significant contributions too – there may well be many others who aren’t in the author list).

Ah well, too many people to list – translators, developers…

Spread the word and have fun

There may be release party near you so be sure to check. Otherwise Lydia has been coordinating the social web effort: spread the word on the usual suspects: identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, your blog and the like – tag “kde44″ where possible.

You can see what everyone else is saying at buzz.kde.org (props to
Franz Keferböck for his work on that).

Enjoy the software that makes up Software Compilation 4.4