KDE Official News

KDE Software Compilation 4.3.4 Released: Codename "Cold"

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KDE SC 4.3.4's codename "Cold" refers to the feature freeze, KDE's development tree is currently in. This Thursday will see the first beta of KDE SC 4.4, bringing significant improvements to the KDE development platform, the Plasma desktop and the individual applications shipped with KDE SC 4.4.


Repositioning the KDE Brand

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KDE has changed over the past 13 years. The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications. Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications.

In the process, KDE's identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere.

KDE is no longer software created by people, but people who create software.

To be able to communicate this clearly in our messaging, it is necessary to reposition the KDE brand so that it reflects the reality. We therefore also need distinct brands for the products we produce. Read on for details of our repositioning of the KDE brand.


KDE 4.3.3 Out Now: Clockwork

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Like the ticking of a Swiss watch, every month the KDE team brings you a new release. November's edition of KDE is a bugfix and translation update to KDE 4.3. With the KDE 4 series picking up in popularity, we're happy to encourage even more people to give KDE 4 another spin -- or just upgrade your existing KDE to KDE 4.3.3. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE 4.3.3 is more completely translated.


Camp KDE 2010 Registration Open!

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Registration for Camp KDE 2010 has officially opened! Check out the beautiful new web site at http://camp.kde.org and click on the Registration link to sign up. (Many thanks to Eugene Trounev for the graphics and Eugene and Leo Franchi for the site design).

Camp KDE 2010 will take place in sunny San Diego, CA on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Both KDE and UCSD have high hopes that all attendees, whether from KDE, UCSD or the public will find the conference fun, informative, productive and warm (average January high of 18C/66F)!


KDE 4.3.2 Available

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The KDE community today proudly announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2. As with any minor release, there are no new features but a strong concentration on further polishing the 4.3 series, which has been widely received as a release suitable for end users of all sorts.

KDE 4.3.2 brings a nice number of bug fixes including crashers. UI issues have been ruled out in KMail, and KWin effects have become more stable. There is also a good number of fixes in KDE's core libraries, which are beneficial to all applications using KDE libraries. More information can as usual be found in the changelog. Most distributions will have updated packages available shortly, so do not hesitate to update your KDE. KDE 4.3.2 is a recommended to everybody using KDE 4.


Akademy 2010 in Tampere, Finland

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The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year's Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

After a successful Akademy 2009 on the Canary Islands, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Akademy heads north to the birthplace of Linux where contributors will enjoy the midnight sun as they spend a week to present, plan and participate in the development of KDE software.


First KDE 4.3 Update Available

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KDE has released the first update in its 4.3 series. Bugs have been fixed and translations made more complete. 4.3.1 includes a new Croatian translation. KMail and KWin have both recieved a lot of fixes and a crash when editing toolbars was solved making this an important update for all. The release info page has the links for source downloads and information on the distro packages which are currently available.


Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

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This year's Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

"The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was a milestone not only for the KDE and GNOME communities, but also for the free desktop in general." said Cornelius Schumacher, president of KDE e.V., "New collaboration efforts were started and existing ones revitalized. We already have seen results for example in the area of the semantic desktop, and on improving the specification processes on freedesktop.org. I'm sure we'll see more results in the near future."

The summit accomplished its goal of increasing co-operation between GNOME and KDE to improve the Free Desktop experience. Throughout the conference there were many examples of successful collaboration including shared technologies, community co-operation and growth of the local free software community

"I was really excited to see all of the energy at the conference - 800 free desktop supporters in the same building!" said Vincent Untz, Director and Chairman of the GNOME Board. "I heard conversations about search technologies, recruiting developers and marketing. Both our communities benefited and I look forward to seeing the benefits passed on to GNOME users."


KDE 4.3.0 Released: Caizen

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KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed. In addition, close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. That is not to say that the KDE team did not add a large number of new features: 2000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months, meaning that any user's pet feature might well be among the improvements KDE 4.3.0 brings.


KDE 4.3 RC3 Released

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Even in the hot phase up to KDE 4.3.0, there have been quite a bunch of fixes to KDE's 4.3 branch. The KDE Release Team has decided to err on the safe side and do another release candidate before KDE 4.3.0 comes out. Dirk Müller has rolled tarballs of the current state of KDE 4.3 and put them up for testers, packages for some distributions are already under way. This also means that the release of KDE 4.3.0 has been postponed for one week. The new planned release date is August, 4th 2009.

One notable change since RC2 is a performance fix for Plasma's caching of rendered SVG graphics that lead to the applet being frozen for a short while after resizing it. A regression that cropped up after RC2, and which resulted in HTTP redirects being broken has been fixed in RC3 as well.

Please give this KDE 4.3 RC3 some good testing to make sure KDE 4.3.0 will be as flawless as possible.