Discover Solid

A Little History

In KDE1 devices were managed by KDE's file manager through special links only suited for filesystem volumes. KDE2 didn't provide real improvements in this area except adhoc solutions for dealing with floppies and audio CDs. In most cases, you still had to create the relevant device links by hand. The KDE3 timeframe finally introduced more innovation in this area. At the beginning it was still a bit rough, but it slowly improved toward a solution able to deal with different types of media altogether and to take care of hotplugging without workaround in the underlying platform.

With KDE 4 coming, it becomes more and more important that the desktop applications and the underlying system work better together. Even with KDE 3.5 we're sometimes faced with some corner cases where the desktop applications lack some information to do their work correctly. In particular, some exotic media are not easy to access, and configuring network from the desktop might be difficult.

Some applications tried to improve those limitations. But they were generaly workarounds introducing security risks, or only dealing with specific cases.

Future...

Solid is an attempt to fix the architecture of the desktop and remove current limitations. In particular, rather than hacking together new implementations in each application, or making applications dependent upon platform-specific technologies like HAL (which currently only works on Linux), Solid will hopefully allow developers to get on with their application's functionality.