The KDE Community has agreed on a release plan for KDE 4.0. The goals are pretty ambitious, given that besides the change to QT4 there are plans to switch to a new desktop metaphor, add a desktop search engine, improve the hardware integration, and add RT capabilities. So far, it all sounds reasonable. But reading the announcement, it struck me at once that this schedule has no room for errors: there is just one Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate planned in! Given the size and complexity of KDE and the ambitious design goals this is simply unrealistic. The first milestone (subsystem freeze) already passed by and had a slip of one day. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but it’s going to get worse, although I don’t think that the first Alpha release will slip that much. (I’m betting that there will be a second Beta or RC release.) I want to stress that I’m not delighting myself on the possible misfortune of others, I’m an avid user of KDE myself, but setting oneself an impossible schedule isn’t helping anyone. So you can watch the schedule being adapted here.