Have no fear KDE 4.3 is here and it's shaping up to be a great release.
Here are some random stats that do justice to this project:
- 10,000 bugs have been fixed.
- close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors.
- 2,000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months
New Features
The changes in KDE 4.3 are largely in three categories: the desktop workspace, the applications, and the development platform.
- Plasma, KDE's desktop interface and KWin, KDE's window and compositing manager are now working more closely together. Desktop effects and the Plasma shell now share their themes, and it is also possible to have separate sets of Plasma widgets and wallpapers on each virtual desktop. The new Air theme makes a visual difference. It is much lighter than the Oxygen theme, which is still available through the Desktop Settings dialog.
- On the applications front, KDE 3 users will like the new tree view in System Settings, which more closely resembles KDE 3's KControl. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, now show previews of images contained in a directory as an overlay for the directory icon. Hovering over it enables a slideshow of the images in the directory the icon represents.
- KDE's development platform has become more stable, more performant, leaner and at the same time more complete. For Plasma applet developers, there is now a geolocation plugin that makes it possible to query the current location. This is used in the OpenDesktop applet to show people near you. The new KDE PolicyKit library provides a mechanism for applications to authorise certain actions based on profiles. A KDE-style API makes it secure and easy to temporarily elevate privileges for an application.
Resources
Announcement | KDE for Windows | KDE for Mac
* for Linux, KDE should soon be in repositories for Kubuntu / OpenSUSE / Fedora and other distributions
Thanks Dot KDE
