Gentoo's KDE team added the K Desktop Environment's 4.0 release to the tree January 17, marking a new generation of KDE. The genkdesvn overlay made this fast addition to the tree possible. It contained ebuilds for KDE 4 since very early in KDE development by allowing outside contributions in an environment unconcerned with stability. In addition to the ebuilds, the overlay resulted in two new developers, Ingmar Vanhassel and Bo Ørsted Andresen.

Many features from KDE 3.5 remain unimplemented in KDE 4, so it cannot yet offer a true upgrade path. Since the software was also just released, it's hard-masked. To try KDE 4, please read the guide.