The KDE Desktop Environment is in news this week for a number of reasons.

To begin with,   the folks at KDE have released the KDE SC (Software Compilation) 4.4 application suite , codenamed “Caikaku”. The KDE SC 4.4.0 is a Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users.

The KDE SC 4.4 release introduces major new technologies such as:

• Social networking and online collaboration features
• A netbook oriented interface   of the KDE Plasma Desktop, called the Plasma Netbook.
• Underlying   infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework, a more stable implementation of the Nepomuk Semantic desktop project and better Desktop search.

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The overall look and feel of this Linux desktop experience has become much more sleek and refined and the community seems to have shown excitement on this release.

To follow what is happening around the KDE SC 4.4 release on the social web , you can visit the new KDE community livefeed , buzz.kde.org ^[2] .

buzz.kde.org ^[2] aggregates what people say about KDE all around the web. It currently monitors identi.ca ^[3], twitter ^[4], youtube ^[5], Picasa Web Albums ^[6] and flickr ^[7] to show you news, opinions and other interesting stuff concerning KDE. The content claims not to have been filtered and in “almost” real time.

With bouncing windows et al, the buzz.kde.org ^[2] website has been launched alongwith a complete redesign of the KDE.org ^[8] frontpage. This step seems to be a   deliberate attempt by the KDE Marketing team to re-vitalise the website which contained orphaned and out-of-date pages.

With such an attractive horde of releases, even GNOME users are getting tempted to give another go to KDE.

How many Gnome-to-KDE conversions do you reckon will take place with these new releases ?