KDE Community Delivers Incremental Innovations With New KDE 4.3 Release

KDE 4.3 (Codename: "Caizen") Delivers Incremental Innovations to the Free Desktop Users and Software Developers

4 August, 2009. The KDE Community today announces the immediate availability of "Caizen", (a.k.a KDE 4.3), bringing many improvements to the user experience and development platform. KDE 4.3 continues to refine the unique features brought in previous releases while bringing new innovations. With the 4.2 release aimed at the majority of end users, KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.

he KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. Read on for an overview of the changes in the KDE 4.3 Desktop Workspace, Application Suites and the KDE 4.3 Development Platform.

Desktop Improves Performance And Usability

The KDE Desktop Workspace provides a powerful and complete desktop experience that features excellent integration with Linux and UNIX operating systems. The key components that make up the KDE Desktop Workspace include:

• KWin, a powerful window manager that provides modern 3D graphical effects
• The Plasma Desktop Shell, a cutting-edge desktop and panels system that features productivity enhancements and online integration through customizable widgets
• Dolphin, a user-friendly, network- and content-aware file manager
• KRunner, a search and launch system for running commands and finding useful information
• easy access to desktop and system controls through SystemSettings.

Below you can find a short list of improvements to the KDE Desktop Workspace.

• The Plasma Desktop Shell introduces a new default theme, Air. Air looks much lighter and fits better with the default application theme. Plasma also has seen large performance improvements. Memory usage has been reduced, and animations are smoother. Activities can now be tied to virtual desktops, allowing users to have different widgets on each of their desktops. Furthermore, Plasma has improved upon its job and notification management. Running jobs are grouped in a single progress bar to prevent the popup of too many dialogs. Animations are used to signify that jobs are still running by smoothly sliding dialogs into the systemtray and animating the notification icon. Smaller changes in Plasma include fully configurable keyboard shortcuts and more extensive keyboard navigation, the ability to create a plasma widget when you drag or copy content on the desktop and many new and improved Plasma widgets. The folderview widget now allows the user to peek into a folder by hovering it and the new Translatoid widget translates words and sentences right on your desktop using Google Translate. Furthermore, KRunner made its plugin features easier to discover by having a 'help' button showing the syntax of commands in the result area. Actions also have a small configuration allowing for example to start applications under another user account.