Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas.
The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all
KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with
(removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

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 filemanager are only two
applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop.
Nearly all user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a
facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

Distributions known to have packages:

• An alpha version of KDE4-based Arklinux 2008.1 is expected
  shortly after this release, with an expected final release within 3 or 4 weeks.
• Debian KDE 4.0 packages are available in the experimental branch.
  The KDE Development Platform will even make it into Lenny. Watch for
  announcements by the Debian KDE Team.
• Fedora will feature KDE 4.0 in Fedora 9, to be released
  in April, with Alpha releases being available from
  24th of January. KDE 4.0 packages are in the pre-alpha Rawhide repository.
• Gentoo Linux provides KDE 4.0 builds on
  http://kde.gentoo.org.
• Kubuntu packages are included in the upcoming "Hardy Heron"
  (8.04) and also made available as updates for the stable "Gutsy Gibbon" (7.10).
  A Live CD is available for trying out KDE 4.0.
  More details can be found in the
  announcement on kubuntu.org.
• Mandriva will provide packages for
  2008.0 and aims
  at producing a Live CD with the latest snapshot of 2008.1.
• openSUSE packages are available
  for
  openSUSE 10.3 (
  one-click
  install),
  openSUSE Factory (
  one-click
  install)
  and openSUSE 10.2. A KDE
  Four Live CD with these packages is also available. KDE 4.0 will be part of the upcoming
  openSUSE 11.0 release.

openSUSE based KDE Four Live CD

Thanks to the coders, artists, usability experts, testers, bug triagers and many more who have made this release the start of something amazing. Tell us what you think on this
4.0 feedback page.