About Me: My name is Rich Johnson, nixternal online (and here on Linux.com), and I am a KDE and Kubuntu developer. I have been working within the KDE community for the greater part of 11 years and have been in the Ubuntu community now for the greater part of 4 years. I have been a Linux user, developer, and advocate now since 1994. Since 1994 I have worked on various Linux distributions such as Debian, SuSE, Slackware, Foresight, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu. I am also part of the amazing KDE community where I spend time developing and writing documentation. My distro time is spent mostly in Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Debian where I am a core developer, MOTU, documentation writer, and community leader. If you are interested in following my main blog, it is located at http://blog.nixternal.com and my website is http://www.nixternal.com. I can also be found on Identi.ca as nixternal and Twitter as nixternal.
So with my little introduction out of the way, let me tell you a little of what you can expect in the coming months for KDE, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu. In KDE we just released the first beta for KDE 4.3. It is making a lot of noise right now, good noise, and we are all excited to see its advancement and maturity. In the coming months we will release 4.3 and continue working on 4.4. In 4.3 there have been a lot of changes when compared to 4.2. Stabilization, usability, and functionality have improved tremendously since the 4.2 release. There is a new theme, Air, which a lot of people are loving. Today I finally setup the Weather Wallpaper in my trunk build of KDE 4 and I must say it totally rocks. The Plasma fixes and additions are amazing. People are writing Plasmoids left and right and there are a lot of great additions, most of which can be found on KDE-Look.org. For Ubuntu and Kubuntu and you can expect more of the greatness that these 2 projects have been doing over the past few years. Kubuntu is already working on bringing in KDE 4.3 and we are working very closely with the Debian Qt/KDE team. We are looking at seeing what Ayatana can bring to Kubuntu and hopefully it will be a happy medium, as there have been a lot of doubters concerning the notifications. We will be updating the Printer management and right now I am working on fixing up the OpenOffice.org KDE 4 support, which I must say is insane.
And before I go, I would like to say a quick thank you to Linux.com for offering up such an amazing service. Great job!
