Release 4.7 - New Features, Improved Stability and Performance

KDE is delighted to announce its latest releases—Version 4.7—providing major updates to the KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Check out the highlights below, or read the full announcement.

Plasma Workspaces Are More Portable

With extensive work on KDE’s compositing window manager, KWin, and new Qt technologies such as Qt Quick, the most advanced user interface is available in more places and on more kinds of devices. Read more...

Akonadi Positions Kontact for the Future

KDE's groupware solution, Kontact, rejoins the main KDE release cycle with all major components ported to Akonadi, a leading personal information management storage service. The Digikam Software Collections comes with a new major version, 2.0. Read more...

Improved Multimedia and Semantic Capabilities

There are major improvements to Phonon and social semantic desktop components in the KDE Platform. Enriched APIs and better stability offer significant benefits to developers. Read more...

New, integrated Instant Messaging

The KDE-Telepathy team is proud to announce the technical preview and historic first release of the new Instant Messaging solution for KDE...still in its early stages. All sorts of accounts are supported, such as GTalk and Facebook Chat. The Presence Plasma widget drops right into the panel for managing online status. As this project is not yet mature enough to be part of the big KDE family, it has been packaged and released separately, and has installation instructions. Give it a try!

Stability + Features

In addition to the many new features described in the detailed release announcements, KDE contributors have closed over 12,000 bug reports since the last major releases of KDE software in January 2011. As a result, KDE software is more stable than ever before.

Help Spread the Word

While it's easy to think of the KDE team as mostly developers, non-technical users are also critical to success. Please help spread the word. Report bugs. Encourage others to join the KDE Community.

Follow what's happening with the new releases on the social web at buzz.kde.org.

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Comments

Good comment. I really like KWin as well, but for perhaps other reasons than you. I don't care about compositing, wobbling and other effects. In fact, disabling all of them is the first thing I do. Heck, I don't even display contents of moving windows. I like KWin because it's so intuitively productive. It is smart on its own, but also lets me manipulate windows fast and easily, by keyboard or by mouse. It is also very configurable when I need that. I'm excited to hear of improvements in 4.7, and I'm very glad this fundamental component of the desktop is not only not neglected, but actively focused on. Thanks, KDE developers!

by Anonymous (not verified)

I'd be a lot happier with 4.7 if kmail2 worked. So far its been unable to migrate my kmail1 emails. I've been using kde since 1999/2000 and have a large collection of emails to migrate. kmigrate gave up after creating my folders. attempting to import the folders manually causes linux 3.0 to oom... I have yet to find a good migration guide and IMHO its badly needed.

Ed Tomlinson

I migrated via evolution. Evolution was happy to migrate my emails from kmail1 and kmail2 was happy to migrate my emails from evoltion. I never tried the kmail1 -> kmail2 migration so don't know how bad it is.

by Anonymous (not verified)

wow great... will try it on my machine soon.........

by Anonymous (not verified)

KDE 4.7 is, as usual, a great KDE release but KMail 2 shoul'd have been shipped with so many bugs :-(

I only confide in packagers which will keep to distribute the great KMail 1.

Anyway... great job KDE Team!!!! :-)

I cheered when 4.7 was released and posted on Facebook as well as Google+ ... a bit too early apparently.

Digikam has new features, that's great. KMail has new features, that's great too.
However, there's something severely wrong. I have never had such serious problems with SuSE/KDE before - they're serious enough that I will be considering leaving the platform, but I hope I can figure it out so it won't have to come to that.

I can't create a new person tag in Digikam from an address book entry. Don't ask me why, I haven't the faintest idea. Could be because no people are showing up in my address book. I have no idea where all my contacts are now, but the address books that worked fine before the upgrade are still appearing in KAddressBook - there's just no people in them now.

KMail is simply crashing every time after filtering messages and complaining about duplicates (conflicting updates). So I can't access my old e-mail and I can only read and send e-mail using browser-based interfaces or my Android-based telephone (which doesn't have all my accounts defined).

After reporting the KMail crash (bug 278745) I get a "fixed in master/4.7.1" reply slammed in my face and the error report is closed as fixed with no information about which packages the fix influences or any other information which could be useful for anyone reading the bug report and who are trying to solve their problems. I've tried upgrading quite a few packages from the factory repository, but that hasn't helped. So much for assuming that a released version is stable...
Apparently there is no plan to fix this in an urgent update to 4.7.0 - all the suckers such as myself will just have to learn our lessons and not upgrade any important system in the future - unless we have *a lot of* time to spare.

Seems the KDE team has learnt one trick too many from the Microsoft people; ship it with known errors, no matter how serious.

The recommendation may be to perform a clean install and import all the data and settings afterwards, and perhaps everything would have worked then - but without a proper tool to migrate settings from a previous version installed (or from a backup of such an install) - how many people are willing to perform clean installs every time? I'm trying to use the computer for work - not just as a toy to waste time on.

We have an iMac in the household - I've cursed it for being unflexible and not very co-operative in a mixed environment. Perhaps I'm going to end up there, just like my neighbour who used to have Linux but said he switched to MacOS because he got tired of having to tinker.

If they told you that bug was fixed in 4.7.1, then that's it, it's fixed. You'll have the bug fixed in the very next upgrade, next month, and it will be better tested. I'd be happy that it was found and fixed already.

If you have very sensitive information in a production machine, you should be very careful with upgrades, on _any_ system. That's why 4.7.1, 4.7.2, etc. are there, IMO.

Haven't you heard? OSX users have plenty of problems on upgrades, too.

Can't say I have heard about an upgrade of MacOS (or Windows) that makes the e-mail completely unusable. I'm sure it is correct that this has been fixed in the 4.7.1 branch - but leaving it at that just isn't good enough in my opinion. Then again, I'm not a KDE hacker myself so I can unfortunately not contribute to help the situation. Guess it will be webmail for me the next month and hoping that the 4.7.1 update fixes it.

If it's tagged as fixed in 4.7.1 then that's the KDE release it will be fixed in. Distros may pick up the patch before then, it may help opening a bug on your distro to request this.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you're not happy with things breaking on a .0 release then don't install a .0 release, wait for the .2. or .3 bugfix release. Unfortunately we don't have the resources to exhaustively test every possible combination, we don't have the budget or time of a Microsoft or Apple or even a Canonical, we're just a bunch of volunteers and have to accept that we will always ship with some bugs. We try hard to make sure nothing too serious gets out, but we often don't experience the bugs that our users find and have to rely on them to help, it's just part of the process of making open source software. In fact, this seems a perfect example, .0 release went out, user finds problem and files bug, bug gets fixed for next release. Sure, it's not ideal, but for me it beats the alternative.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Well I guess he was confused by the title of the release announcement, promising better stability? Why do you promise this then?
BTW, better stability as compared to what? KDE 4.6.5? Or kde 4.6? Or gnome perhaps?
If you make a bold statement like that, people expect you to make good on that promise. That's normal.

John

12000 bug reports closed, 2000 specific bugs in the released software resolved since 4.6 - the reference was also in relation to the semantic desktop where a lot of long-term issues have been resolved.

by Anonymous (not verified)

how many of those were originally filed against KDE < 4, and simply closed as "wontfix - obsoleted version"?

by Anonymous (not verified)

of all those bugs, only 7 were from versions prior to 4. There was one from KDE 2 that got fixed with a change to the basic I/O routines and 6 exclusively from KDE 3. These mostly had to do with incompatibility with the old version of Q.T. so it wouldn't do much good to fix them now.

That is quite impressive.

Did the bugs you filed get fixed?

by Anonymous (not verified)

And how much bugs still open...
and never looked at...

by Anonymous (not verified)

Stuart: good work with the bug fixing.
I really mean that!
Still: be careful with the broad, sweeping claims. :-)

John

by Anonymous (not verified)

Everything pretty but...

I still wait for full funcionality of Kontact. Lack in it, capabilities of simple integrations with Google.Simple system of backup.

Here however, is better Gnome Evolution

by Anonymous (not verified)

Try akonadi-googledata-resource. A bit basic, but works for syncing calender and contacts.

I compiled it from git, see if there's distro support for your system.

I just installed 4.7 from the kubuntu PPA. It is amazingly fast!
Ok i admit, at the same time i also activated the software rasterizer for Qt, but man is that system fast now.
I was considering upgrading my laptop, but those plans are put on hold now :)
keep up the great work!

PS: didn't install the new PIM yet. Hope its as great as the rest as kde 4.7.

my Kubuntu upgrade went with one small hitch...Smooth Tasks broke, and the maintainer isn't around. Oh well.

Against my better judgment, I installed the new PIM. It works really well. I am surprised at what an improvement KMail 2 is over 1.

That this upgrade was against my better judgment...
It wouldn't even start when I first upgraded (by the way, there are warnings all over the place that this is _experimental_). I'm not the owner of my own inbox? Ridiculous.

After much forum-ing and other exploring, I discovered in "Akonadi Configuration" (typing in start menu find box) that the place I stuck Mail was not where it was expected. Modifying that to its actual location made KM2 run.

Then I had to check out the rest of the resources. Calendar was funky, cuz there are now several choices for resources to display. Pretty easy to sort out once I had discovered Akonadi Configuration. Just cuz I don't know better, I went to the Akonadi Server Configuration tab and restarted the server after the modifications.

Oh it also took quite a while for the 3000+ messages to become usable in KM2. In the migration, I was re-introduced to my bad email behavior of saving everything. (A message that my password was changed with no indication of the account OR the password. Yeah, gotta keep that one.)

I've been using KMail for a long time. KMail 2 has dramatic improvements.

Thank you so much

And Plasma 4.7...wonderful. No issues (well I miss the Smooth Tasks eye candy). Just fast and solid feel. Activities...after the first load, switching is fast, everything solid.

By the way, none of these issues were resolved by complaining at dot.kde.org. kde-look.org gave the clues about the status of Smooth Tasks and the forums (special thanks to Ben Cooksley, again) pointed the way to Akonadi and proper file locations.

Thank you KDE devs.

Carl

by Anonymous (not verified)

Installed 4.7, and yet again the desktops effects are broken again.
Opening a bug report doesn't help, as nobody looks at them.
Thank you KDE.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Yes they do, even if we don't always write back on them.

If you don't open a bug report you should have absolutely no expectation for it to get fixed.