I pulled down the Kubuntu flavor of Heron yesterday, and thus far I like what I have seen. I haven't noticed any great leaps in speed or interface changes. The geek part of me sometimes longs for the heady days when new interfaces came out as a matter of course.

Today, though, interface designers are more conservative in their changes, because while drastic changes may please the geekatroids among us, they make casual users very nervous.

Lately, though, I have begun to get that little thrill down my spine when I play with KDE 4. It's an interface that's pretty and (bonus) so fundamentally different than what we have now, it brings a lot of excitement to the table.

The typical fallacy about KDE 4 when people look at it is "oh look, a pretty desktop" and form their opinions based on that. I admit, I had the same thought. The Oxygen-themed icons and the widgets are indeed very pleasing eye-candy. But under the hood, there's a huge set of differences that could fundamentally change the way Linux developers code. To make sure I understand these changes, I called up Aaron Seigo, the lead developer of Plasma and asked for a basic rundown of what he and his team are doing.

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