KDE 4.0.1 Is Now Available

The first bugfix edition of KDE4 was released out in the wild, yesterday, as the KDE Community announced.

KDE 4.0.1 brings you a lot of stability and performance improvements and many updated translations for most of its components. It is already translated into 48 languages and more are coming soon.

We all know the problems with the shared components used by the applications. Many of these issues got fixed, and your life will be much easier. You will notice that there are a lot of bugfixes in KHTML, Konqueror’s HTML rendering engine.

The next edition from the KDE 4.0 branch, KDE 4.0.2, will be released at the beginning of March, including more updates and bugfixes. This summer, KDE 4.1 will be available and will be based on Qt 4.4 with all its performance and functionality improvements. Rawhide – the unstable version of Fedora – is one of the distributions that already have KDE 4.0.1.

KDE 4.1 Roadmap and Future Goals !

KDE 4 is out, as you probably already know, and it comes with a lot of innovations for the Linux desktop. KDE 4 is the next generation of the popular K Desktop Environment, which seeks to fulfill the need for a powerful yet easy-to-use desktop, for both personal and enterprise computing. KDE project’s goal for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the FREE desktop. But today, we will talk about the future versions of KDE 4 and what features they’ll bring. Let’s have a look first at the main goals for KDE 4.1, which will be released somewhere in July:

• Windows port (Frameworks and Applications)
• Mac port (Frameworks and Applications)
• OpenSolaris port
• Plasma with widgets on canvas, makes things like layouting much easier, and generally integrating widgets into Plasmoids
• Webkit in Plasma
• GStreamer, Quicktime, DirectShow9 Phonon backends
• Apple dashboard widgets support in Plasma
• Decibel VOIP and real-time communication framework
• Done! Dragon Player multimedia player

KDE 4 Released/Preview : The future GUI ?

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications — you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0′s new technologies.

Kubuntu 8.04 Will Not Be LTS

Canonical and the Kubuntu team decided that, due to the delayed release of KDE 4, the upcoming release of Kubuntu, 8.04, will not be a long term support release.

Periodically, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and other Ubuntu variants from Canonical launch a LTS release (the version is supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server). Canonical and the Kubuntu team have decided not to tag Kubuntu 8.04 as LTS, because KDE 4 will be released shortly before the distro. Incorporating KDE 4 in Kubuntu would be premature, and could cause instability to the system.

KDE 4.0 Coenig : Release Candidate 2.

KDE 4 is the next generation of the popular K Desktop Environment, which seeks to fulfill the need for a powerful yet easy to use desktop, for both personal and enterprise computing. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want.

The second release candidate of KDE 4.0 was announced last night by the KDE Team. It includes many improvements from previous Alpha, Beta and RC versions: “the KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0.”