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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't they just jump to KDE 5? KDE 4.10 is a confusing name, because in standard decimal format it would look like KDE 4.1...

This looks very nice. KDE is the most polished desktop environment currently out there for Linux/BSD/illumos, and the 4.10 release seems to be the one that's finally caught up with OS X in terms of fit and finish. I would download it, if only I had a computer fast enough to run it...

Stuck with a 1.6GHZ dual-thread Atom desktop with 1GB of RAM and an ancient integrated graphics chip. Xfce is the only full desktop environment I can run with minimal performance impact. Guess it's time to upgrade to either the iMac or the XPS One.

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Double digit minor version numbers are very common. Linux was 2.6.34 or something, GNOME was up to 2.32, current Blender is 2.65 etc etc.

KDE major version numbers seem to follow Qt major version numbers, KDE3 was based on Qt3, KDE4 on Qt4, so I'd assume that KDE5 will eventually be based on Qt5.

KDE5 is going to require a significant refactoring of the code base into qt quick 2 and c++11 anyway. Just look at all the things they need to add to kwin (though it is probably the worst case): http://community.kde.org/KWin/Qt5

My understanding is that KDE4 was itself the result of a significant refactoring. My guess is that it's only a matter of time before the conversion happens (and by the looks of it, the devs are already looking into it).

A lot of things in KDE4 were (re)written from scratch. No such thing will happen for KDE5. It is mostly about splitting the base libraries.

That said, Plasma and KWin will probably have the most changes, one from the mass conversion to QtQuick, the other for supporting Wayland.

Any KDE based application could in theory start using qtquick instead of qt C++. I don't know why you would take a C++ implementation and make it run on qtscript, though.

I easily see new applications written against kde5 using a lot of qtquick and js implementations. Especially with Ubuntu phone coming, there would be little to change between some gui designs between supporting the desktop and phone.

KDE's versioning scheme follows specific guidelines. In a x.y.z scheme, a bump in x means API and ABI incompatibility with previous versions.

It's not too confusing, is it? I'd say it's rather common. On the same front page is 'Scala 2.10' here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175870

KDE 5.0 would be a major release: I doubt they are looking into that now.

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