KDE Official News

As of today, the latest release in KDE's 4.5 series is 4.5.4, which adds a bunch of stabilization and translation updates on top of 4.5. Users in general are encouraged to upgrade to 4.5.4. The changelog has more details about some of the changes that went into this release.

Enjoy upgrading!

The KDE community has made available first beta packages of the 4.6 series of the Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications and Frameworks. All components add exciting new features making the stack more suitable for use on mobile devices, leveraging Nepomuk as the search infrastructure in the UI, and moving away from HAL as hardware abstraction layer.
Source packages are available on ftp.kde.org, but most likely your distributor of choice will have created easy-to-install packages by now.

Today, KDE has made available 4.5.3, the November updates to the Plasma workspaces, the applications built on top of KDE's platform, and the platform itself. This release, as all x.y.z updates, contains bugfixes, performance improvements and localization updates only. As such, it's a safe upgrade and recommended for everyone running 4.5.2 or earlier. The update contains a number of fixes in Okular, Dolphin and a series of KDE games. Also, the new shared data cache continues to mature.

KDE has released version 4.5.2 of the desktop and netbook Workspaces, the applications and the software development platform. These releases are the second monthly updates to the 4.5 series and contain nothing but bugfixes, translation updates and performance improvements. This release further stabilizes the newly (in 4.5.0) introduced KSharedDataCache and fixes a number of visual glitches, seen for example in Dolphin.

Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. These releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface.

KDE e.V., the organisation supporting KDE has published the quarterly report for the second quarter of 2010. The report covers many KDE events held all over the world, such as the Brazilian Akademy-BR, which was held this year for the first time. Akademy-ES, the Spanish KDE conference is another topic of the report. The report also holds information such as new additions to the KDE e.V. membership and its financial status.

KDE today celebrates its semi-annual release event, making available new releases of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Development Platform and a large number of applications available in their 4.5.0 versions.

In this release, the KDE team focused on stability and completeness of the Desktop experience. More than 16,000 bugs have been fixed, and many feature requests have been filled. The result for the user is a system that feels faster, takes less time to "think", and works more reliably. The large number of bug fixes goes accompanied with many parts that have got an extra portion of tender loving care. Plasma 4.5.0's new notification system is one example here. It is designed to get less in your way, yet to support your workflow as smoothly as possible. Visually, the striking monochromatic icons make for a more consistent look in the notification area. A highlight of the KDE Applications 4.5.0 is surely Marble, which can now be used for map routing as well as viewing. The Konqueror web browser can now also use the WebKit engine to render its content. The KDE Development Platform 4.5.0 offers a new generic cache for applications that need high-speed access to certain data, such as icons or other pre-rendered artwork. The new KSharedDataCache speeds up loading of many components, while the new HTTP scheduler is optimized for concurrent access to web servers, and makes loading of pages in Konqueror and other parts using the KIO HTTP mechanism faster.

Today's releases are the first in the 4.5 series and will be followed with updated versions approximately monthly that will focus on fixing bugs. The next feature releases are planned for January 2011. If you would like to test-drive 4.5.0, you can do so by installing the packages that should be made available by your operating system vendor. You can also choose to build 4.5.0 from source, the nitty-gritty of that can be found on TechBase. For the impatient, there is also a Live CD available.

Just a very quick update: KDE's release team has made available the last release candidate before 4.5.0 comes out next week. Please give it another whirl and tell us about problems with this release. Tagging will happen in the next days, so be quick doing that!

KDE met for its yearly flagship conference, Akademy, in Tampere, Finland. The event was kindly hosted by COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions. Akademy started last weekend with a two-day conference attended by more than 400 visitors from all over the world, which then blended into several days of designing, programming, discussing and working on the future of the Free Desktops. Important topics included mobile devices, community topics and many others. Read the full press release for more information.

During Akademy 2010, KDE e.V. and KDE España signed an agreement making KDE España the official representative of KDE e.V. in Spain. This will bring the international KDE community and the Spanish KDE community closer, while giving our local friends the authority to act officially as our representatives.