Open source developers at XPde.com have released the latest version of its desktop environment for Linux, which mimics the Windows XP interface.

The team described XPde 0.3.0 as a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment.

XPde aims to recreate the Windows XP desktop environment on Linux in order to allow Windows users to 'feel at home' in front of a Linux computer.

"While it is still in beta and under heavy development, this release includes a lot of improvements regarding stability and usability," the group said in a statement.

XPde is a desktop environment and window manager for Linux, and is available for free under an open source licence.

The company said that additions include a keyboard set-up applet, and a first version of the file explorer, and that the desktop "tries to recreate the XP interface to the pixel point, nothing more".

"No clipboard compatibility between Gtk and Qt applications, no emulation of Windows applications, no unification on the widgets of X applications. Just a desktop environment and a window manager," said Xpde.com.

The developers have admitted that they don't know whether they can be sued by Microsoft.

"The solution here is that we are not going to ship a complete Windows XP interface clone out-of-the-box," they said.

"But it will be so easy to configure that 'someone' could make it look 'exactly' like the Windows XP interface. We won't provide this configuration."

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